I used MA a few years ago and it was fine.
I tried recently to get it setup with a more recent version of MAME and GM but MA doesn't work any more since MAME changed the format of it's .xmls. It is also unsupported and hasn't been updated since the version I bought years ago.
I spent hours the other night trying to generate the correct xmls for MA but none of them worked and I could never get the frontend to launch without it getting stuck when it has to import the gameslist xml.
My solution was to move to the "Attract Mode" front end which I got setup and working in about 4 minutes including scraping everything and installing a really nice looking theme which looks incredible on my arcade cabinet running GroovyMAME.