ARpiCADE Forums

is it possible to write the software iso to a usb thumb drive and do away with a sd card, I worry about file corruption on a incorrect shutdown??

Not really. Due to the design of the Pi you will need to use a SD card to get it to boot. You could run most of the system off a USB stick but would still need an SD card (there's no built in USB stick options so you would need to sort that side of it). The few I know of running USB sticks are doing it for reasons other than SD card corruption issues.

Have you had / are you having issues with corruptions? If so I'd recommend a high quality SD card, it shouldn't really be much of a problem with a decent SD card running ARpiCADE (cheap/knockoff SD cards can be an issue though - I only use Sandisk Ultra cards). The only time I strongly recommend using the software shutdown (or a software reboot prior to turning off the cab) is after making changes to your setup like swapping to a new Attract-Mode theme or tweaks to a games config or similar. If I'm not making changes I usually just switch off the power while it's sitting in Attract-Mode (if the screen saver is running I tend to wiggle a joystick first so it's not playing video when the power cuts - not sure if that's actually that important though).

All that said, on other (not ARpiCADE) RPi software there may be a lot happening in the background like system logs, checking for updates, etc. that could be an issue if you just kill the power without shutting down.