@grant2258 Yes, I just wanted to report that after some testing yesterday. You were faster than me. ;) I can confirm that most of my samples work in mame2003 binary and mame2003-plus, but not in mame2003 from source; with few exceptions like Blockade that works in all of them.
Since there already is a pull request for this, I consider this topic as solved. Thanks for the help! (edit: as well as @markwkidd for the fix and @Headrush69 for testing.)