> why > on earth are these prehistoric versions so popular?
Because it's the only way to run mame on this kind of hardware. The later code bases simply have too many requirements and overheads because of the way mame evolved. Until someone re-writes things to work on something like the DS this is a very worthy project and needs to be supported. How can you say all that when I give photo's, PHOTO'S I say ! And in colour of the classic games. I should have got my sexy girl model friend to recline in front of it