Because I didn't wanted to open the cabinet each time for updating MAME-roms or ArcadeOS, I decided to connect the cabinet to a network, as I already had two more network-cards lying around. Easy said, not easy done...

Problem:

The cabinet-pc with ArcadeOS runs under pure (win98-)DOS. Connecting it to a Win98-machine is not a standard issue.

Solution:

I found several pages addressed to this. I tried everything they said, but nothing worked for me. As an extra handicap, the cabinet-pc didn't have a floppy-drive, meaning that I had to flip the floppy-cable between two computers, each time I tried something new.

I have currently installed Win98 on the arcade-pc, just to make the network-connection. This is an overkill-situation, more on this later.

Network Running!

I managed to get the network up and running from the cabinet-pc. I now can access the network out of the cabinet. However, I can not access the cabinet-pc from any other pc in the network due to limitations in the environment: networkwide drive-sharing needs share.exe to be loaded, but using Win98DOS, this isn't possible.
Later on I'll hack my copy of share.exe to get it loaded, thus enabling network drive-sharing. Running old plain 6.22 DOS should also resolve this problem, but DOS has a 2 Gb partition-limitation. Maybe later on I'll decide to parition my HDD again, but for now I'll live with it.

No drivesharing shouldn't be such a big problem, btw. I can just plug in a keyboard and work on the arcademonitor, thus requiring only 2 actions for network-access: connect network-cable and keyboard.

I got it up and running using Microsoft Network Client 3.0, available for free at ftp.microsoft.com in the /bussys/clients/MSCLIENT/ directory. More info on this can be found at J. Helmig pages, remember to look for 'connecting to a NT4-server', other solutions didn't work for me.