The settings in question are explained well here

There can be no space between the word BLASTER and the = or the parameter will be read incorrectly, and some of these parameters (P, H, and E) are dependant on certain types of card. Some of the parameters are optional, for example, I just have the minimum requirements of A, I, D, & T configured and the other three may or may not be needed depending on what type of card you have.

The Port Address is almost always 220 but the IRQ is something that varies from system to system. The DMA sometimes causes problems if it isn’t set to 1 and can cause a system halt. The Type should be 1 if you have an older Soundblaster, or a Sound Blaster emulating card, 3 for a newer plain Soundblaster, 2 for an older Soundblaster Pro or 4 for a newer Soundblaster Pro.

Almost certainly your soundcard will need to run in higher memory space and will need EMM386.EXE to make it possible. You will also need to add the following line to CONFIG.SYS;

device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe noems novcpi

Once you have set the sound up and got it working you can edit aracedos.cfg and mame.cfg and set the type of sound card you have set up. Now ArcadeOS will have sound effects when it starts, stops, crashes or launches a game and more importantly you games will play with sound.

During the testing of my DOS setup I got pretty fed up with the boring boot process and I wanted to make it a bit more interesting.

Once my PC is booted it gives a brief notification from the graphics card and a quick POST then you see a few DOS commands and messages roll by (only a few as the @echo off command is at the top of the file). Then it sits there with the screen showing the confirmation messages until the ArcadeOS Frontend loads up with the game list menu, and it is this last part I wanted to change.

Now, once the DOS commands have run I clear the screen and then echo a picture onto it which stays there until ArcadeOS has loaded. You can see how it looks by downloading this file unzipping it and running it by double clicking.

If you right click on it and select Edit you can see where I have commented out the commands that execute ArcadeOS and have added a pause at the end that will leave it on screen for you. It also appears full screen when run on my cab.

It’s only on screen for a few seconds but it adds a nice touch to the boring boot process and helps take away from the fact that there is just a plain old beige box inside there.

Now it's pretty much done apart from the long and ongoing process of configuring settings for games as you play them. Like I said arcade games have a multitude of screen resolutions and refresh rates and while some games you play will not need any configuration, some will need you to manually adjust the resolution in ArcadeOS. This will tag an extra switch onto the end of the command that it sends to M.A.M.E. such as

dmame Pacman -resolution 320x240

Once you have run Pacman with those settings in ArcadeOS it will save them and do it automatically when you next run it.

You can also make use of the 8 Custom Lists in ArcadeOS which allow you to sort your games into lists according to your preference. You could sort them into Horizontal and Vertical games for example. Personally I have a list called Favourites which contains all the games I play the most, Play-Choice10 which has the Nintendo Play-Choice games in and a couple of other lists.

By default the lists will just be named
Custom List 1
Custom List 2
Custom List 3
Custom List 4
Custom List 5
Custom List 6
Custom List 7
Custom List 8

but if you want to rename them you can do so by editing arcadeos.cfg.

What I love about this set up is the fact that it goes from switching on to playing a game in about thirty seconds and to switch it off you don't have to wait for it to shut down, you just hit the power button and it's gone just like that.

The only real issue I ever had with ArcadeOS was the screensaver. Sometimes it would kick in and would prevent a game from running so I would try to launch a game, have to escape out of it and then launch it again. The next time I ran the cab the screensaver might come on straight away, so all I did to fix it was disable the screensaver. While there is an option to adjust its timeout in the menu, I found that to disable I had to again edit arcadeos.cfg and set the timeout value to 0. Ever since then it has been 100% fine and has behaved itself admirably.