Well, the OP should just move to MAME current tbh, not only it has support for TATE in both directions, but it probably also has better support for cocktail mode (i highly doubt all cocktail fixes from the past 22 years were backported to MAME2003+).
As for FBNeo, it is not suitable at all for cocktail setups : some games had their 2P mode and cocktail mode tied together, and ended up being un-cocktail-ified so that 2 players could play them without requiring a cocktail setup.