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My goal is to make my arpicade as close to a dedicated cab as possible, which means booting directly to a game.

So far what I've done is edit the run.sh file and used the sample to boot straight to game (the one that used simpsons as a sample). The boot up process seems a little long, that's fine, but let me know if there is a way to speed it up let me know.

My questions are:

1. Is there a way to speed up the boot process. Like can I eliminate things to make it faster like "searching for roms" or any other things that might be slowing down the boot up process

2. Is there a way to eliminate the boot splash screen from appearing, or even editing it to something else. If so how?

3. Is there a way to eliminate the "loading" screen? if so how?

4. Is there a way to eliminate the hot keys? When the game loads I don't want the ability to "pause" or "bring up menu" or "exit"

I think once I accomplish these things it will be perfect. Now if question #1 isn't possible. That's alright

Thanks for your help!!

All possible (except significantly speeding up the boot process, but you can disable the romscan at startup).  Have a read through the instructions/FAQ for whichever verion of ARpiCADE you're running (on the right hand side bar of this site), it should cover all of it.  If you hit any issues I'm happy to help though.

Ok I took a look.

1. I "think" I turned off rom scanning. I went to the service menu found toggle rom scanning on and off, I pressed a button, but not sure if it's toggled on or off, is there an indication somewhere?

2. I saw the instructions for changing splash screen. I went to the folder. I'm using a CRT and horizontal. Found a Horizontal High Res photo, looked like the right size. Then I saw another horizontal photo in the folder but it was really squished. Not sure which one to "edit".

3. I saw some loading screen images too...but I decided that the loading screens don't bother me, so I'll keep it that way

4. Found the hotkeys.ini and deleted everything after the sample and explanation. Decided to also delete everything in the hotkeysp2.ini just in case. Tested it out and hotkeys no longer work so that's great!

So everything is great. Just not sure if rom scanning is on or off...how do I know? and does turning them off speed up the start up? and not sure which file to edit for splash as there is two horizontal and the one horizontal is a squished image.

Overall I'm very happy with the product and the community for helping me out as I'm a total newb who's never touched a raspberry pi before.

The horizontal splash is squished looking due to to the resolution (1920x480), on CRT it is displayed in 4:3 aspect and will look right.  It's probably the one you want to edit.  Once you have it changed you'l need to run the update splash option from the service menu.

To be certain,  it's easy to make each of them simply 'black" then run the update splash...

I don't know if I should make another topic thread. So I'll try to ask on this one.

I had silent boot working successfully for a week. Booted it up a few times.

Been away for a week and went back to my machine to boot it up and just shows the jammapi FBI splash screen and then black screen for like 5 minutes and nothing.

Turned it on and off again. Same thing.

Took the SD card out and put it back in and PROGRESS. Now we have a "Now Loading" screen and.....nothing. Left it trying to load for another 6-8 minutes.

Figure SD card is probably corrupt.

I can't have SD cards lasting a week. Is this normal behavior? Is this because I turn the machine off while the game is running?

Going to try and format the SD card and start all over again and see if that works, but I can't be formatting cards weekly or even monthly.

No, that's not normal behaviour.  SD cards generally shouldn't die that quickly, unless you run some sort of high wear testing on the NAND or similar they should last years.  Time away from the cab should have pretty much zero difference too.

It's possible to corrupt the SD card if you switch the cab off while the SD card is being written to.   I recommend returning to the menu before turning off the cab, as high scores are written when you exit a game (at least for MAME).  I also recommend doing a full shutdown or reboot from the service menu after making any changes, just to be safe and make sure the changes are properly written to the SD card.

Depending on the SD card it may be worth trying a better one too.  I don't know which type you used but I've been using SanDisk Ultra (and now the high endurance ones) for over a decade with very few issues.

I'll try a different card.

I just formatted the one currently in it and reflashed arpicade. Everything is working again, but who knows for how long.

I know best practice is to exit the game to the menu, but the way I have it set up to make it a "dedicated" cab, I have it booting into the game directly and eliminated all the hot keys so that I can't go to any menus, so the arcade machine is powered off while the game is running, much like a real dedicated arcade machine.

Will this be a problem going forward?

Is there a way to make the card just read only and no writing to it?

It shouldn't happen using it as a dedicated style either.  MAME only writes when you exit the game so if you're only running one game, no menu, no exit, it shouldn't generally be writing much to the card anyway.  Hard for me to know for sure as I don't really know the cause of it the first time around.

It is worth making a backup image of your SD card once you have it setup how you want, at least that way if it does happen again you can image it and be up and running again.

It is probably possible to make a one game setup read only, but I don't have an answer beyond that for you offhand.  I am happy to look into this in the future though.

It shouldn't happen using it as a dedicated style either.  MAME only writes when you exit the game so if you're only running one game, no menu, no exit, it shouldn't generally be writing much to the card anyway.  Hard for me to know for sure as I don't really know the cause of it the first time around.

It is worth making a backup image of your SD card once you have it setup how you want, at least that way if it does happen again you can image it and be up and running again.

It is probably possible to make a one game setup read only, but I don't have an answer beyond that for you offhand.  I am happy to look into this in the future though.

Thanks, I'm going to upgrade my micro SD card to something like a san disk endurance and hopefully have better luck that way. Thanks again for all your help!