Oh boy, you guys are fantastic!!!
Slamo, can you make a MAME recording of you playing Quake with SB16?
-aviwrite video.avi
This will make uncompressed AVI, so before sharing you might want to reencode it using something like virtualdub, with some lossless codec like lagarith.
Dacicus, mame devs have an IRC chat where any setup question can be asked: #mame. I would talk to them myself, but I don't know what is not working exactly and how to express myself about something I don't know how to ask. Can you ask them if the problem you are having is a bug or by design, or maybe they know a workaround? They seem to be using such emulated machines with installed OSs quite a lot. This stuff even supports networking from those OSs!
I don't think sharing HDD images with FreeDOS installed is illegal, but we'll need to research on this. Also, if we distribute such an image, I think it'd be handier if the HDD had smaller size? I think for any potential TAS one would need a dedicated HDD image to prevent messing things up. So I think it'd just need to be the size where the biggest DOS game would fit?
I found a thread that contains
TONS of other installation instructions, like windows 2000, linux or amiga os. The wiki link above copies the first instruction from that thread.
http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=86865
Important notes from IRC:
Lord_Nightmare one important thing to note if you have a killer instinct or similar arcade hdd and want to 'update' it to a later version: please image the original drive first, MAME is missing MANY drive software versions
Lord_Nightmare dumping the ata-identify page from drives is strongly recommended as well, theres a special utility to do that, ask on the dumping union forums
Lord_Nightmare the ata identify page contains the drive serial number, drive type name, and some other important information that many games actually check!