You are lr-mame2003's dev? Great work on such a complex system! Good luck with developing. :)
not at all, just putting in some very small tweaks! the hard work was done by others.
Apparently I had to put the samples in /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame2003/sample instead of <rom dir>/samples (notice the S). I'm awfully sorry, but a lot of things work different in lr-mame-2003 then what I'm used to since 1997.
i've now changed this to /samples/ - see
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/lr-mame2003
(along with a bunch of other directory names that were different from standard MAME)
they aren't kept in the ROM directory as that could be shared by several systems, and also cause the .zip files to show up in emulationstation. instead, it's in /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame2003/samples/ (but at least it's samples rather than sample!)