i have MAME .96 in my cab and everything is running fine, with the exception of a freeze up every now and then......should i keep upgrading when new versions of MAME come out or just leave things as they are. I see .97 is out now.
Do the upgrades of MAME effect the running of MAME itself, or do the upgrades pretty much just allow more games to be played that weren't playable before.
The best way to answer these sorts of questions is to keep an eye on the whatsnew and readme files included with every release:
http://www.mame.net/whatsnew.htmlhttp://mamedev.com/releases/whatsnew_097.txthttp://mamedev.com/updates/whatsnew_097u3.txtAlso keep an eye on MAMETesters:
http://www.mametesters.org/MAME is nothing more than some generic input/output framework attached to a bucketload of specific cpu emulation code bound together in "drivers" for various games. Each new version of MAME attempts to add new drivers, or fix existing ones if there are any differences between them and real-world hardware they try to represent.
If the current version of MAME that you run plays the games you like, and does so to the correct speed and accuracy that you consider "good enough", then there's absolutely no point upgrading.
If however, you happen to spot that one mystical game in a whatsnew.txt that you've been longing to play since your childhood days when you last saw the cabinet "in the flesh", then that's about the time I'd be clambering for an upgrade.
I think my cabinet is still running a build around .89 or .90-ish. There's no point in upgrading for me, because the dozen or so games I truly enjoy work fine, and the 5000 other titles don't really interest me in the slightest.
Do be aware that as MAME grows, it does get slower. More and more code is added to make emulation more accurate, and the MAME devs are notorious for putting functionality above and beyond optimisation (and just quietly, I do have to agree with that philsophy). Upgrading to a new version of MAME 9 times out of 10 will make things slightly slower. Only on rare occasions do they take the time out to optimise particular code, or take out something that slows the process down incorrectly. In that case, there will usually be a big fuss made about the game all of a sudden (especially if it's a 3D game, it seems) and you'll definitely read about it in the whatsnew.txt.
But in general, avoid updates if you don't *need* them.