Excellent, thank you. I got as far as the amixer controls and couldn't figure out how to adjust it.

Next question, if I try to load a rom and it fails and kicks me to the terminal, the only way I know how to get back the to the launch screen is to do a "sudo reboot". Is there a command to load the game launch screen again without having to do that?

I'm not 100% sure, since I moved back to V.7.10. But I think that's what it was.

Thanks for the confirmation @ssilver2k2!

I think that this may be more of a raspberry-pi/alsa deal, rather than pimame. I posted this article somewhere else in this discussion, but if you haven't checked it out, you should. There is a section on saving the alsa state that may help you. You may also want to download alsa-utils, that may help too (sudo apt-get install alsa-utils)