Hi. I usually play Mortal Kombat 1 and I thought I'd point out that the game's DAC volume is set way too high by default.
With the default levels, there's a boomy drum sound that overwhelms everything else, and it appears both in the music, and throughout the game over various sound effects.
For reference, I'm attaching three 320 kbps MP3 files: 1. A rip of the CD audio track of the "player select" song from the SegaCD version of the game, which includes the arcade's music in CD audio format. 2. A dump of the same music sequence with MAME's default output levels. 3. A dump of the same sequence with the DAC volume set to 0.10 (default is 0.50).
I normalized the SegaCD rip's volume to -11 db in order for its volume to somewhat match the MAME files, and make the comparison easier.
Hope this helps make MAME better in portraying MK1 the way it deserves.
Thank you people for some incredible work on MAME. Keep it up!