Spy Hunter kicked ass, I forgot about that one.
Joust and Zaxxon were also big quarter-suckers.
For some reason I liked the Star Wars wireframe pseudo-3d game (the Death Star one).
Dragon's Lair was fun a few times but got old--it's that gameplay thing I was talking about.
MAME isn't that complicated IF you have the ROM images (note this is illegal if you don't own the particular machine for each ROM image!). I do not condone illegal possession of ROMs!
Most implementations of MAME have a GUI wrapped around them so it's pretty easy to setup and run.