Yeah, that's the kind of commentary I expect from the MAME community; you shouldn't have bothered. I personally feel the way they have the whole set up is nothing more then a massive inconvenience to, well everybody. They gotta be OCD.
Not trying to sound like a jerk here, but it's honestly pretty freakin simple to obtain a working romset for any given version of MAME, and it seems crazy to me that someone is complaining about the MAME authors striving to have emulation as accurate as possible. I would much rather the MAME developers streamline each and every game as opposed to garbaging up the already ENORMOUS amount of code by worrying about backwards compatibility, especially since updating to the most current romset can literally be as easy as a few mouse clicks.
I would be careful saying that the way MAME operates is a huge inconvenience to everyone, given that the majority of responses on this very thread indicate otherwise. That along with the fact that no one is forcing you to update to every new version makes this complaint about compatibility just strange to me. As long as you know which romset you have, you should be able to download that specific version of MAME and have every single game playable (assuming that the game is listed as playable). Again not trying to sound like a jerk, but you're ranting about a problem that is easily corrected on your end.
Okay, you know what? Let's argue then.
There are several websites I go to, to access roms, most of them actually do have a MAME version applied to them. What's amazing is, even then, there's been times when even if I am running the version they support, the rom won't work, saying it's missing files.
Or what about versions of MAME I don't WANT to use? I should have to use a funky ass old version of MAME just because a romset hasn't been updated in forever.
Like the version of Battle Toads that was floating around online, I went to like 4 or 5 different websites and finally I looked at the error log, saw what was missing and then opened up ALL of the versions of Battle Toads I had, found the missing files in like three separate versions and dumped them ALL into one folder and it FINALLY worked.
Every single version of SMB 3 I have found, none of them work with the version of MAME I have and I am not about to turn around and break the archive I already have, just because I can't get a single game to work properly.
Or hey, how about how, for whatever asinine reason, I have to have the 4-player version of TMNT in order for the 2-player version of TMNT to work.
Or, I love how, MAME actually used to have some sort of high score back-up thing going on, but because it was an emulated featured that was added on and not actually an authenticate part of most cabinets they decided to remove it. So someone had to come around, design and patch and have people compile their own versions of MAME because the high and mighty developers who work on the software didn't like it.
No, you know what? It's a cluster
---fudgesicle---, that's what it is. There's no good reason why they have to break stuff every single time they update to a new version, all they are doing is inconveniencing people who would otherwise not have any issues. You are telling me to do something and I am telling you, "NO", I shouldn't have to. The only reason why I was even using official MAME was because the compiled version I use, MAME++ isn't supported by the frontend I want to use.
I'd rather spend my time using something else then having to dick around with their classy software.