> I know at least I was sniffing around the forums around MAME 0.35b1 and wasn't added
You missed the mame + roms on a floppy era & no zip file support.
The neogeo driver was an interesting time as rom distribution was sketchy. Downloading those huge files over a modem from a site on the other side of the world giving you 100 bytes per second as long you hit it with ping -t.