I ended up giving this a try this weekend.
I have an old PC that I sometimes use as a backup Plex server. It's got an AMD FX-6300 (6 cores) w/16 GB RAM.
I wanted to try GroovyArcade linux image. I purchased an AMD 6450 video card for $15, from ebay, to put in the old PC . Pretty low cost of entry.
I got GroovyArcade running easy enough and was pretty impressed, at first. Unfortunately, it kept freezing when I would exit most games. This made it unusable.
I did some searching and learned that this is pretty common. I found a thread that seemed to indicate the issue was related to ffmpeg or variable bit rate videos...
I deleted all my videos and it still froze.
The more research I did, the more I saw that Windows is the way to go.
I'm not anti-windows (far from it) but I did not want to, essentially, recreate GroovyArcade in Windows. It would have required a massive amount of research, and (like I said) I only wanted to TRY GroovyArcade. I was not committing to anything. I have been pretty down on emulation for a while, and it's why I got into purchasing JAMMA PCBs. But I do come back to emulation from time to time, because I can't fork out $400 for every game I want to play.
I came across this post in my google results when trying to solve the GroovyArcade freezing issue.
The instructions were excellent and everything worked exactly as it was supposed to.
Since it worked like a charm - I am committing to a J-PAC setup using this image.
I am VERY impressed with the quality of MAME's emulation when it is running on something other than low-powered hardware. I have spent too much time with Raspberry Pi(s) and other low-powered devices over the past few years. I forgot how good proper emulation can be. I was awesome to play in 15khz; it was a very similar experience to my real boards.
I wanted to post here to say THANK YOU for putting it together. You did an excellent job, and I really appreciate it.
@chunksin - THANK YOU!