AdvanceCD alternative?

Hi all,

I just had a fun weekend attempting to establish a good dual-boot solution
for my brother-in-law's cabinet. What's interesting in his setup is that
he's got a WG D9200 and an Audigy 2NX external soundcard.

We're trying to get a boot-time option to go straight into a MAME interface.
I thought "this shouldn't be too hard". Yeah right, Paul! :-)

I got AdvanceCD installed on a new 1.5G partition on his HDD whose only
purpose will be to run the OS. The ROMS are on a separate FAT32 partition.

Of course, the sound didn't work (cause there is a fancy ALSA config I need
to setup to establish USB sound), but the software worked wonderfully,
booting right into the menu and the games all played nicely.
When I powered up the console, I was disappointed and surprised (oh how
naive I am) to find that the configuration for ALSA was all read-only on
what appeared to be a virtual iso9660 mountpoint.

There was no obvious way to mount the other FAT32 partition or even identify
which device it was. No man pages. heh. At this point, it became obvious
that the design goals for AdvanceCD were not in sync with my own.

So, here's what I want:
1. AdvanceCD-style direct booting into the GUI
2. Reasonably-complete linux installation
3. full advancemame compatibility wrt svgalib etc.
4. working ALSA
5. ability to easily mount that fat32 partition
6. friendly to a 640x480 resolution setup
7. ability to use Xwindows if need be
8. all in a lightweight distro if possible.

Any pointers for me?

Thanks in advance!

Paul






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