Reply To: Which Arcade emulator should I focus my time on?

[Floob]

Well, the ones with a libretro core can offer you the standard settings such as shaders and other graphical tweaks.

But it really is horses for courses. I install 4 different ones just to compare and contrast – saying that if you want new roms you kind of have to go with fba-libretro at the moment.
Based on your description I would have thought either of the mame4alls should do the trick for you.

General version info here:

MAME versions and romsets on RetroPie