Oh yah, and if it makes a difference, every time I "Fully Removed" a version to try another, I also deleted the /home/USERNAME/.mame directory, as that seems to be holding my config files. Didn't want one version messing up another...

UPDATE: First I uninstalled the version provided by Synaptic and downloaded a more recent version built for Ubuntu. Even though I'm running Mint some Ubuntu stuff works fine. Mint was originally based on Ubuntu, then switched back to being based on Debian. I found the Ubuntu version from the SDL non...

I just moved over to Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon (from decades of Windows) and installed MAME using the Synaptic Package Manager, which gave me version 0.220. I know there's a more recent version (and that may be the solution,) but this is where I am now. I can easily run MAME just fine on the desktop ...