A couple of weeks ago, the motherboard I'd planned to use for my MAME machine died (the voltage regulator on that model of motherboard is prone to failure). This morning, when I got in to work, my machine wouldn't boot. Same model of motherboard, bought at the same time. Same problem.

I was planning on replacing my MAME motherboard with the cheapest one I could find on TCWO, with a couple of exceptions (i.e., it had to have an AGP slot, since I'd picked up an AGP video card with an S-Video out connector; and I wanted onboard sound). So now I had an excuse to go buy it, since my boss wanted to replace my work machine in the cheapest possible fashion, so I placed two identical orders.

The motherboard is amazing; it's chock-full of connectors for all sorts of devices, and the BIOS is the most configurable I've seen so far (and at $71, it was quite a bargain). Everything went together smoothly, it booted promptly... and then Windows barfed on it.

Which, of course, I'd expected; it still had all the drivers from the old motherboard, so I went into Safe Mode and deleted them all. I rebooted, and Windows went along its merry way, finding new hardware and installing drivers therefor.

Or at least it tried to. Windows found the new hardware before it had installed the CD-ROM drivers, so it couldn't load the hardware drivers off the Windows CD. I had to use another machine to individually unpack each needed file from the CABs on the CD, put them on floppy, and stick the floppy into my machine. One by one. Over and over again. It took over half an hour just to do that.

Eventually, I got everything installed, and my work machine is once more chugging away. Can't wait to get the MAME machine running; all I need now is an S-Video-capable TV. Well, and to do all that sanding and sawing and hammering.

Addendum: This motherboard lets you replace the boot logo with any 256-color graphic up to 640x480. That'll make for a spiffy boot screen on the MAME cabinet!