Distro for a PC from 2007 dedicated to run MAME only

I'm looking for advice choosing a lightweigt distro for a pc with 2 Gb RAM and a single core 2 Ghz 64bit AMD CPU and an nvidia 8400GS. It's for a dedicated arcade cabinet. What I would like to have is a fast boot directly to MAME the emulator I will be using. Another important thing is the possibility to hide the OS (mouse pointer, logos etc.) when booting or shutting down so that you wouldn't see at all that it's a PC and not a real arcade machine.

And here comes the hard part. For me it's important to have existing guides to do that as my Linux install experience basically consists of reading and following guides word for word.

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Thanks for any help!