I run AdvanceMenu in a vertical orientation at interlaced 640x480 which is about the highest my arcade monitor can reasonable go. This gives me a nice menu of games in two columns with the option to toggle multiple preview windows. The previews include screenshots, the cabinet of the game you have chosen as well as the advertising flyer. There are also menus you can toggle that use icons or marquees. I don't find either of the latter two menus terribly useful.

I did a number of button assignments to try and make a more intuitive navigational structure for AdvanceMenu that fits my control panel layout. In a nutshell, I assigned launching of a selected game to any of the red fire buttons. Both player one and player two sticks can select and launch games equally. I also increased AdvanceMenu's acceleration factor for the analog devices. This means that the spinner can roll through the menu very quickly if you're so inclined.

The player one start button rotates through the various menu configurations while the player two start button rotates the panes of the preview windows (when visible).

My coin left and coin right buttons perform page up and page down of the game listing. This speeds negotiation a great deal when you want to go from Donkey Kong to Zaxxon.

One of the other secondary fire buttons alternate between a full game listing and a shortened "favorites" list. Related to this is a button that pops up the menu that allows me to assign the selected game to the favorites list.

For the most part I have managed to eliminate the need for a conventional keyboard. Since I do most of the configuration work via an ssh session from another computer on the network, I keep the keyboard stashed in the back rather than mounting it below the control panel on rails (as I had been considering during initial construction).

I turned off the repetitive background music loop and replaced the large thudding noise of the keypresses with smaller popping noise that seems to fit a little better. I did add little musical start and stop sounds for launching and returning from games. They are not long and help to soften what is normally a very abrupt transition.

I am currently only using two emulators: AdvanceMAME and Daphne. I have opted to merge the lists so that launching Dragon's Lair via Daphne is no different from any other game and even appears alphabetically among the AdvanceMAME titles rather than on another screen.

The lines I am using to enable Daphne are as follows:

emulator "Daphne" generic "/dl/daphne" "lair vldp -framefile /dl/framefile/lair.txt"
emulator_roms "Daphne" "/dl/titles"
emulator_titles "Daphne" /emulation/titles
emulator_altss "Daphne" /emulation/snaps
emulator_include "advmame"
emulator_include "Daphne"

The "/dl/titles" directory for the emulator_roms tag is simply an empty file by the name of "Dragon's Lair". This gives AdvanceMenu something to list for the argument since Daphne does not use ROMS in the same manner as most other emulators.

I use the "config save_at_exit" option to make sure that AdvanceMenu returns upon reboot (or reload) with the configuration just as I left it. This includes starting on the last highlighted game in the menu as well displaying whatever menu format I used at the time of shutdown.

My advmenu.rc file is available to download for anyone interested in using it for reference.

AdvanceMenu is quite powerful and I still have options to explore as I tweak the new machine. Be sure to read through the full documentation that comes with it to get a sense of what is possible when you configure it for your own system.