Thanks sbock. This is why we need to have a discussion on which controls should be mapped to keys and which aren't really necessary. As i am not all that familiar with MAME myself, i welcome thoughts on the matter.

I wonder if this has something to do with language settings. Hmm no idea really. If you run the start script (/opt/sdlmame-start.sh) from xterm, what does it output?

I really appreciate the feedback from everyone. Since there are multiple people with significant efforts on ROM testing, can i ask you to use the wiki (say, this page) so as to keep a single common list? Add new ROMs in alphabetical order in the right category, and make it bold if you can verify a categorization by a previous tester.