That is probably your issue, you are using a old rom with the current MAME version. All Capcom games that use the qsound bios file were changed around version 0.184 i believe, so any rom from before then will not work with current MAME versions. This is why MAME romsets and the emulator itself are versioned, because the roms themselves can change when better dumps are made or when MAME itself improves the emulation. Also you may not even have all the files needed for the game, if it is from a non-merged set it will be fine, but if it is from a split or merged set you could be missing files as well as the bios needed for the game to run.
Try downloading a version of MAME from around 0.180 or so and see if it works there.