I belive I have this figured out but if someone could just confirm.  I have a Betson multi-sync 27" monitor.  The PC has a VooDoo3 graphics card.   Some of the games work (mostly the newer games) but a good chunk of the older games will not come up.  The monitor goes blank and flickers a resolution.  It looks like an ArcadeVGA card would resolve all of this.  Alternately using advancemame would resolve this.  I tried advance mame but could not get advcfg to even work.  I loaded the svgawin driver and it looks like my voodoo3 is just not supported even tho it says it might be.  Lowering hardware acceleration did not help.   I tried hard coding the 60mhz resolutions with a utility I found but it still would not display the older games.
I am thinking I need to try another graphics card (my main PC has a Radeon 9800 pro that works fine with advancemame) for the mame machine or bite the bullet and order a ArcadeVGA card.
Any help appreciated.
Don