Well, effectively, you can think of the MAME source as an operating system under which programs (the ROM's) run. To all intents and purposes you're looking for a program that requires as a minimum Win 7 (MAME 0.140+) that will also run on DOS 3.2 (MAME 0.37). A lot of the updates that occur are related to drivers, i.e. getting certain gfx and sound chips emulated accurately. This means that it's impossible to run certain ROM's on older MAME releases as the required code is literally non-existent in the MAME source.
GAMESHARQ wrote:I was hoping that maybe someone here who is more experienced with this sort of thing was able to find a way to edit the new rom to work on the old emulator.
If you can find a VERY talented MAME source programmer (like one of the MAME devs) that's willing to spend a LOT of time helping you out retrofitting 0.37, you may be on a winner, but that's highly, highly unlikely. It's MAME that would need to be programmed, the ROM is what it is. When they dump the ROM chips, the data stored on the ROM is taken. When work on the arcade system is updated and will now allow the ROM to run, it's then added to the ROM set as "working". It's not the other way around. They don't pull the data from the ROM chips and then think of a way to get the ROM to work.