Encountered same, contrary to Retropie's documentation.

I wish I had the brains to compile it myself and redirect samples out of the roms folder :(

Fixed this in #85 - when it gets merged just update lr-mame2000 from source in retropie :)

YAY! Super thanks @dankcushions

I have installed from source and I cannot get samples to work from this folder:
/home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame2000/samples

Can someone please tell me what folder the samples are supposed to go in?

Thank you.

Works on mine from there but I also have a sample set in the mame2003/samples folder. I believe /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame2003/samples is the default

I just tested that and I dropped the samples for Astro Blaster in my /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame2003/samples folder and it did not work. I know the sample file does work because if I drop it into my MAME4ALL folder /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-mame4all/samples it works using MAME4ALL I just cannot figure out where to put the samples for lr-mame2000 for them to be picked up by the emulation core.

If you are using mame2000 on your build, can you try deleting your sample file from the /mame2003/samples folder and see if it still works? And if it does, that means it's pulling that sample file from another folder.

Thanks.

Update: I just did another pull from source and this time it worked. My samples are in this folder:
/home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame2000/samples
and I tested to make sure that is the correct folder they need to be in, and yes, the samples now work just fine.

thumbs up