Ex emulator user from way back when. Just decided to mod my original xbox for a project yesterday, mostly for the emulation. Looking for a good mame, nes, gen, and snes to start. right now running neogen25, nestopia2.0, and snes9box. All smooth so far, I chose those 3 for the look and layout mostly, like the preview images, etc (although the neogen runs way, way slower than the others scrolling through games, if someone has a better one).
For mame, i tried final burn 1.13, liked it a lot, 1.20 didn't work, and coinops haven't tried yet (any experienced advice on which is better?).

I plan on slowly building a base of roms, images, carts, previews, etc. My big question as I'm new to this scene is how does one go about this? Obviously I tried to grab some big pre built packs (from newsgroups,torrents, here, etc), hit and miss, a lot of incomplete stuff or busted downloads. Seems like the mame stuff I can find a big pack for fbl or coinops, but the NES/GEN/SNES packs with images, previews, etc, seems hard to find. I plead ignorance here, don't know if this is a community no no to try and find others extras, or is there a nice community build up somewhere for these?

I certainly don't mind doing the hard work, the roms arn't hard to find, lil work getting the correct formats etc, but if the extras are already done super well somewhere that would be great obviously.

Few extra questions...
If i someday build a pc for the same purpose is there any reason my database of roms/previews/etc couldnt be moved over from xbox(obv different emulators)?
When I was FTPing, I noticed a group of roms wouldn't work each time, some research seems to be a char limit on xbox filenames, so big ones won't go. Is there a fix for this other than renaming all these myself?

Thanks all for reading, glad to be part of the community, if anyone still messes with these things that is