Wow, a lot of the complaints against MAME in this thread have absolutely nothing to do with MAME itself.
It doesn't make you run from game to game every ten seconds.
It doesn't make you have to build franken-panel monstrosities to play every game.
It doesn't make you tweak settings every ten minutes.
It doesn't make you update ROM sets every time a new one is released.
It doesn't make you have to play every ROM.
Those are all problems that the end-users have and cannot be blamed on the program.
I have a MAME cabinet. It is ugly. Very ugly. But I love it.
Look here:
I run advancemame and advancemenu on it with a PC monitor that can do native arcade resolutions. I don't worry about boot up screens or hiding the fact that it is a MAME cabinet. Why should I deny it's nature?
I don't run the full MAME romset, just the games that my controls are suited to. So that means mostly classic stuff, shmups, fighters, and beat em'ups. All of which are my favorite kinds of games.
I don't care about boxes, manuals, or art. That stuff is irrelevant to the gameplay.
I have played over 500 hours on this machine on various games. I don't fiddle with the settings every ten minutes or spend hours trying to get a game to barely run. I just run a list of a bout 1000 or so games that run 99% perfectly on it and don't worry about the rest. A few years from now adding them will be much easier so I'll just wait.
Mostly I pick a game and spend some time with it for a few days. I participate in online score competitons, or offline ones with my friends. I play online with GGPO. I think I unofficially hold the world record for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs now, I just need to get around to submitting it to Twin Galaxies.
Without my MAME cabinet I never would have gotten into a hundred different classic games. I can go on the arcadecontrols forums and see that somebody thinks that PHOENIX is a great game. Well, I scroll down my rom list and there it is. I give it a test play, and I mean a real test play, not 30 seconds of apathetic-ness, and decide if I like it. If I do then it's the game of the day and I spend the rest of the evening on the stool hunched over in front of it.
Do I pretend I'm playing the real thing? No. I don't know what a real PHOENIX machined played like, I only have what I have. And it is a lot of fun. I don't live in the past. To me PHOENIX is a brand new game and the MAME cab is the way that I first played it so I will become emotionally attached to it.
You know, I really like Defender. It was one of the first games I played on my cab, before I even made the new control panel. I was playing it with Mortal Kombat controls. I was just standing there playing it during the daytime with the lights turned off and the blinds dawn, and had been playing the game for several hours (usually lasting less than 5 minutes per game) when I finally died and just stood there (I didn't have stools yet) and stared at the attract sequence. It hit me.
I'm playing an arcade game in my living room. I had completely forgotten the fact that it was a MK cab or I was running MAME. The old game had absorbed me.
I recently played a real dedicated Defender cab. I hated it. The controls were horrendous to me. I didn't like the lines of the cab and the speakers gave completely different sound. I especially didn't like paying to play it. I guess I was really spoiled about that!
My point is that MAME has an allure all to it's own. We play on PC monitors a lot, in cabs with controls sometimes radically different from the original and are often custom made. There are many of us out there that don't worry about authenticity and try to get what fun out of the games we can while trying to save a buck or two. And after playing MAME for a while you become used to it and the idea of an emulator just fades into the background while you enjoy the game the same way the PCB guys do. Our gaming experience may be different, but it's no less valid.
Would I buy PCB's now after becoming attached to so many games? Nope, unless it was a game that wasn't emulated very well that I felt like I really wanted to play, and even then I'd probably settle for a console version. And if there is no console version? Well then, I guess I won't be playing that game anytime soon.
Anyway, enough rambling from me. Just please know my arcade gamer brethren, that there are many people out there who enjoy MAME, the MAME experience, and the potential it holds. Don't look down on us.