BloodyMando

well....this is my first ever post here.... so first i would like to say hi to all the people on the board just to put things straight...... i havent started using ANY kind of emulator for arcade games before today but Neorage X fact is.... i didnt even know other emulators existed. to cut a long story short..... usually all i just did was just get the roms from a friend of mine and the emulator (neo rage X) my friend now lives in another country.... so i guess i have to depend on myself to get the latest stuff most of my roms.... (mainly KOF roms) work fine on neo rage from kof 96 to kof 2001. starting from kof2002 i get problems,the game works but controls are messed up.... also..i want to play kof2003 too.... and i cant find any working kof 2003 roms for neo rage so.... i finally decided to switch to MAME. now what i wanna know is this..... i see people talking on this forum about compiling mame to make it work with new games (correct me if i am wrong or not knowing what i am talking about please..) and people talking about DAT files and posting looooong lines of text that look like code that i dont understand what the hell they mean or what to do with them even. can someone be kind enough as to explain what i should do to make new games work??? and what do i do with all that DAT file code. also....considering the KOF 2002 controls issue.... does that go away when u play it using mame or is there some kind of patch to fix it (i read something about a patch for it somewhere) your help would be greatly appreciated... thanks