I've seen all the many sound ROMs that are available for download at IPDB. Wild guess here: they are provided this way for burning onto programmable chips, to be used as replacements, when needed for various games ?

Being a video enthusiast (as well as a pin addict), I could tell you a couple easy ways to extract specific clips from much larger video source files. Is there some way -- maybe using something like the software Audacity ? -- that one could extract specific pieces of dialog, or specific sound or music cues, from these downloadable ROM files ? If so -- in some basic detail -- how would I go about doing that ?

There are virtual CD / DVD drives for mounting discs or games (Daemon Tools, etc.), in order to play or do other things with them, and game emulators for Amiga, Atari, and various others from earlier game history. When you refer to a pin mame, is that the same sort of idea ? I would have thought there might be something equivalent, for virtually running one of those ROMs . . . ?