For many, having a complete archive is about digital preservation. They want to know that if a hard drive fails or a rare arcade board dies, the data still exists somewhere.
The MAME community relies on a few high-reputation repositories for full sets: Full Set Mame Roms Download
: Modern full sets can exceed 70GB to 100GB for ROMs alone. If you include "CHDs" (Compressed Hard Disk images for newer arcade games), the size can balloon into the terabytes . For many, having a complete archive is about