New to Vids/MAME, with some silly questions...of course

I posted this to the MAME group as well, but it's pretty quiet over
there.
Hope I'm not too far astray with my questions.

I'm a pinball guy who would like to have a few classic vids in my
very
limited gameroom space. MAME in a custom cabinet looks like the
perfect solution to me. Buying individual games is not a
consideration due to budget and more importantly space constraints,
and the pins are NOT leaving. I have a corner of the gameroom all
picked out for my BAM (Bob's Arcade Machine.) I have an older PC
running Windows XP, and I'm starting out with the 15 inch PC Monitor
that came with it. I'm handy enough to build my own cab or refurbish
an existing one, and good enough, I think, to hack some controls to
accommodate my favorites. I'd like to be able to play
Asteroids
Tail Gunner
Galaxian
Defender
Centipede/Millipede
Galaga
Pac Man/Ms Pac Man
Space Invaders
Joust
Tempest
Gyrus

I cannot name 5 more games I'd like to add. Seriously, that's it.


So...What advice do you have for someone who really and truly is only
looking for a limited ROM set? I looked at a couple of sites
offering
ROMs and was pretty overwhelmed and intimidated by the all of the
choices.


Am I fooling myself with this monitor? Given the limited variety of
games that interest me, I'm hoping it will do for a while. What
should I be aspiring to once I've learned enough to be more
discriminating, or should I go ahead and go for more monitor now?


I'm interested in creating more than one control layout, and
switching
them out ot accomodate different games. My biggest concern is
Tailgunner, becuase it is so different (seemingly) from the others.
It used a joystick that behaved more like a trackball/mouse in that
it
was omni-directional. Anyone have this game and have a suggestion
for
the control?


Mostly now, I'm reading. I have downloaded MAME and a couple of free
ROMs to experiment and learn with. Thanks in advance for your
thoughts.

Cheers!!
Bob


.

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