Introduction
Okay, this side project began as a mission to find a more user friendly front end than MAME32 for my cabinet.  MAME32 served me well for the past two years but seeing what others were doing with their cabs made me want to investigate other alternatives.  I initially intended on investigating Mamewah as well as Ultrastyle and ArcadeOS but that didn't end up happening.  The main reason is that I got caught up in everything Mamewah had to offer and, consequently, did not have the time to give the other two FEs the attention they deserved.

Background
According to the Mamewah site "MAMEWAH is an ArcadeOS inspired frontend for DOS / Windows command line M.A.M.E. (NOT MAME32) and other command line emulators under Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. MAMEWAH is designed to hide the Windows environment and also to be controlled purely by arcade controllers (joysticks and buttons)."  It is a British production by Minwah.

Installation
Mamewah was easy to install.  I downloaded it and the required system files from Mamewah's site.  Less than ten minutes later it was running on my cabinet with the default settings.  Mamewah comes with several default 'skins'.  I chose the 800x600 version and did some fiddling with it with the excellent screen designer.  However, I wasn't able to get the "oomph" I was looking for.  Luckily there is the ScreenShots Archive which has a great many excellent, downloadable skins to try out.  I chose a nice Dragon's Lair skin from their selections.  This archive also includes a wealth of other related resources such as sample configuration files for various emulators, a great tutorial (which I did not read first), and other helpful information.  A fantastic site!

Dragon's Lair skin (from the ScreenShots Archive)

Working with the skin
I downloaded and installed the skin easily but when I ran it, I could not get the background image to show up no matter what was tried.  After an hour of scratching my head, I searched the BYOAC software forum and found the answer quickly.  The skin was created for an older release of Mamewah, before the naming standard was changed.  Background images now needed to be named "mame-main.jpg".  Once this was done, everything worked flawlessly.

I added another image to the screen for the control panel photo (if available).  (Note- In case you don't have the control panel art in the cpanels folder, they can be found  here.) Another default setting I changed was the graphic that is displayed if there is no cabinet or control panel art for the game to be displayed.  I simply renamed the default image to something different to keep anything from being displayed.  This just looked cleaner to me.  Both these actions were simple and intuitive.

Documentation
More or less everything is documented in short text files included in the installation directories.  The answers were not always clear to me without several re-readings but I cannot necessarily fault the docs as I am not always the most careful reader. 

Use
As noted in the background above, Mamewah requires only the joystick and the two player start buttons to run (and, of course, the escape sequence to exit).  Joy up or down goes to the next or previous game in the list, respectively.  Left joy sends you up 25 games, right down 25 games in the list.  Player start 2 takes you to the menu system and player start 1 is always the selection button.  Very, very simple!  In fact, the skin I chose listed the controls at the bottom of the screen.  Navigation could not be any easier or more user friendly.  However, we will see how novice users will react when they see the new interface for the first time. 

Conclusions
The time I have spent with Mamewah thus far has been great.  In the coming weeks, as I get time, I plan to further personalize it for my cabinet.  It is a great product which I give two big thumbs up!

My files

Links
  Mamewah Home.

ScreenshotArchive - Help pages, MAMEWAH Layouts, and screenshots.

  MAMEWAH Setup - Great MAMEWAH configuring tool

New 7/30/2005- I have added the Atari 2600 games to my cabinet.  To see how it was done, click the below link.