Chris,(posted 9269 days ago)I'll ask the dumb question now.... are you running Win95/98 or are you running WinNT ?!
If you're running WinNT then forget about trying to run the DOS version of Mame unless you're prepared to do some tweaking with your Commander settings for Mame..... and even then it will probably not run as well as Mame32. I always use Mame32 on my WinNT machine and I always use MameDos on my Win95 machine.
If you are on Win95/98 then you probably need to start looking at your settings as everyone I've talked to once they've figured out their best settings for MameDos find it faster on most games than Win32 Mame.
BeeJay.
PS: Use the standard soundblaster option not AWE even if you have an AWE card. That often makes a big improvement to speed for those with AWE Soundblaster cards.