MAME OSX hasn't been updated in quite some time (2009?), but the source code is available...

Just wondering if anyone has tried compiling with a newer version of MAME? I tried it out myself, but I quickly ran in to a major stumbling block: I don't know what I'm doing

If you don't know what you're doing then I'm afraid that you're wasting your time. MAME's core has changed an awful lot since 2009, and drastic changes would be needed to the OS X bits in order to get the new version to compile again.

Clobber from open emu has done some work updating this, think he got to 1.42