What is the best place online for arcade game-rips? Arcade stuff is the single absolute HARDEST VGM to find it's not on Zophar or other game-rip websites! Is this because it's hard to rip music from arcade games? Please help thanks in advance!

To my knowledge, there isn't much to ripping from arcade roms. There's a program I use called M1 (https://vgmrips.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=110) that uses the actual code from the roms themselves. No rippng necessary! as a bonus, there's also the option to render .wav files [and, I think, mp3] if you want to add it to iTunes or something.

Hey, always cool to see people excited about vgm history. Here are some resources I use:

ruiner9's Soundtrack-a-Ganza (Thread 138495)
Great source of arcade rips, probably the biggest and most concise you'll find on the easily-reachable internet right now. Lots of big-name arcade classics, as well as a ton of lesser-known stuff to discover.

nx666's Soundtrack-a-Ganza (Thread 194543)
Another great source of rips. These games are going to be a little tougher to get 'into' musically, as they're from very obscure developers and often showcase some cheaply-composed but historically-relevant music.

VGMRips: Arcade (https://vgmrips.net/packs/search?q=arcade) and VGMRips: Neo Geo (https://vgmrips.net/packs/search?q=neo+geo)
VGMRips is basically an online version of what Fuzzy described, but if you mouse over a track and click the down-arrow in the Save dropdown, there's an .mp3 option. Unfortunately, you have to download each track individually, but for the convenience of it just being right there for download, I don't mind the hassle. And here I just searched for Arcade and Neo Geo, but there might be more arcade-based rips for search terms I can't think of right now.

Enjoy!