I'm going to ignore the first couple of questions and take the last one; comparing the exe size to desktop MAME:

DOS MAME uses an executable compression program (called UPX) which uncompresses the exetutable at runtime. It's a little like a self-extracting zip, except different, and much faster, and likely less efficient. Anyhow, that's why the exetuable is smaller. Without using them, the DOS MAME exe is huge also. And it still takes the same amount of memory after it decompresses itself. Such exe compressing programs don't exist for CE and wouldn't really make much sense, if you think about it; except for saving a little bit of Storage memory. The same amount (or a little more) Program memory would still be required to run it.

Darren

> I'm not a programmer, (I wan't to be and currently working on it) but I just got
> to ask this question. Why is the MameCE executable is 2mb and the Extra Large
> build is 8mb? How come some other program on the PocketPC is sometimes 1.5mb or
> less. Is there a way to make it smaller and compress? The reason I ask this is
> that even the most recent Mame (for Dos/Windows) only about 3mb?
>