Freelancer

I have an older PC setup to run in my cabinet as well. I originally had an external USB drive hooked up that had all the roms. There was considerable lag from the time that I choose a game to the time it actually launched. I went to Fry's and purchased a SATA card (about $20) installed it in one of my free PCI slots and then used the external SATA connection for my drive instead of the USB connection. This made a huge difference in performance.

There is never ever a reason to choose to do multiple partitions for performance reasons. Since both partitions reside on the same hardware spindles (hard drive), there is no performance to be gained. I'm no expert but even with multiple harddrives I don't see how that would impact GameEx very much. The program is running in memory and not streaming off the harddrive most times so I don't think there is much performance to be gained by splitting the roms/emulators/gameex across different harddrives. I'd setup my harddrives/partitions to be easiest to manage/backup going forward. In my case I have a small harddrive that has my OS on it and then a big one with GameEx and all the emulators. I poached my old pc from work and know then every 6 months I'll probably be upgrading pc's. So in order to make it really simple to move GameEx I seperated it from the OS drive.

Sounds like a cool idea. I'm betting you could hack together something along these same lines with some scripting. If you made use of the Pre and Post script running options along with something like a 3rd party picture viewer and AutoHotKey, I'm sure you could make it work, although it certianly wouldn't be as clean as having it rolled into GameEx. Anyone know if there is a way to pass a var from inside of GameEx that would let the script know what the name of the game that you just launched was? I'm also betting this functionality could be added by Plugin (not that I"m a programmer ) I know there was a guy on the BYOA forum that was using a projector to light his cabinet marquee, he was projecting the marquee based on the game being played. Sounds like you are thinking along the same lines that he was.

One other option is the free program iRotate (http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/irotate.shtm) you can setup a hot key to rotate your screen whenever you need it. I've been using it for about a week now and seems to be working well for me.