I put the ROMs in there as you suggested and it worked! Not a wide variety of useful cheats for it though.

I still wonder why Pugsy's cheats gave me trouble. How long did the download take for you?

@Silverlight Right... Read the comments and Mica's suggestion in the MK thread as well as your problems downloading from Pugsy's cheats (have no problems myself, it's just very slow is the server).

I think there is a solution, Mica suggested MAME 0.119. The MK3 ROM was fixed by version 0.128 (u something so that's the Haze era) so any correct ROM wouldn't work on that. Try putting the UMK3 ROMs into the MK3 zip to see if that would boot up (extract the UMK3 zip to get the ROMs first).

If there are any other problems, just let me know via PM.

@Yawackhary It's a bit of a long story. If you read the comments in the MK1 section, that will answer your question. The guy hooked me up with what he used to rip MK1. Apparently there's a compatibility issue with the cheats. The cheat.dat file (which is in the classic format) he gave me only works with the MK2 Challenger hack and the hack only runs on the older MAME. I can't complain much cause it's working, whereas before, i failed to find a method on my own.

UMK3 (which i have a working rom for) doesn't have the story elements in attract mode (and a couple stages) that MK3 does. I plan to rip them sometime in the future but after MK2. However, to rip MK3 at all would require a working rom which i haven't been able to secure.

@Silverlight What version of MAME are you using? Modern MAME (as in the past few years) usually tells you what files are missing before you can get the game to run. ROMs do get redumped now and again if the older ones turn out to be bad. Oh and sometimes there's an obscure BIOS/security chip file.

If you use Final Burn Neo instead, then I don't know but that I think follows the MAME ROM sets and their changes.

@Alxala You actually have a working rom of the original MK3? I downloaded 5 different roms from 5 different sites and none of them worked.