> For reasons I won't go into, the next version of Mame - .172, will have different > licensing which affects frontends.
Huh? At this point the only affected frontend is UIFX, and given the ability to have autofire and hiscore.dat in stock MAME you can do fine with plain MAMEUI if that's your thing. Every other frontend on the planet (and there's a lot of them) will continue to work fine.