Off of flaming here.... Just some info.
Mame used to take a few hours to get everything setup to compile... It was a PAIN! Then every 3 or 4 versions you had to look around to figure out what to do next...
Now... you download the preset set of tools... You download the source... and you follow a few directions from the
www.mame.net howtocompile tab... and your basically done.
NOTE: I've had to run make a few times in the past... when I ran out of memory... I think this is fixed (but I also now have 500mg ram... so that might have been the trouble.
make clean will clean everything out for you.
Its also good to do this because the executables are LARGER... this is good because then it can load only the parts of mame being used (saving memory)... the compressed versions require the ENTIRE app to load in memory to uncompress it.
Anyway... its about 20 - 30 minutes complete with reading the instructions... about 10 minutes I'm sure if your used to the tools..