Some more advise for when you start using Arcade Manager A new version is due out very soon. These issues are present in ver 2.0.2
Arcade Manager does in fact require the game roms in order to work correctly. If the game rom is not available, then the manager will assign a neogeo cabinet with asteroids intro vid playing. As soon as I provided the correct game roms arcade manager worked perfectly.
I also found that attempting to use a shortcut for the roms linking to another hard drive does not work. It has been mentioned that it is possible to trick NRA into using a different hard drive location.
Arcade Manager Filters only work for one filter at a time. Their is no way to set up hierarchy and whatever filter is listed first will be the only one that works. So for example if I want to see games between 1980-1985 and I want to see roms that I have, it will only show me roms I have. Filtering by year is ignored.
The 4 specials refer to vertical games such as PAC-MAN.