Thank for the reply, think I'll stick with the latest Wolfmame versions then. Second question, do you need to have the same version of Wolfmame as the .inp file you're attemping to playback? If so I can see this being a problem if I'm always updating to the latest version and want to keep some .inp files around I couldnt play them back and would need to keep lots of versions around.
Was able to playback someone's .inp 0.153 file with my 0.155 version so I guess it works?
It's hit-and-miss. I don't think playback across separate versions is technically supported or even a goal of the MAME Dev team, so any time it works it's just pure luck.
What Jeremy said. Playback across versions isn't supported or a goal of MAMEDev. They don't go out of their way to break it though, so you can often get playback to work in "close" versions, so I'll frequently try it if I haven't installed the other version yet. Occasionally there are major changes to MAME that mean all games will have playback broken between versions. Other times there might be a change to a specific game driver and playback only breaks between versions on particular games.
If you want to be able to watch recordings of a lot of different games in a lot of different versions you have to suck it up and keep copies of a lot of versions and also different romsets, or be able to find older romsets when needed. Fortunately the dkong romset hasn't changed in at least 10 years, so if you just care about DK, romset changes aren't a problem. Finding old versions of MAME usually isn't that hard, but finding old romsets can be harder. But if you're persistent you can get almost all replays to playback (if they ever worked), even stuff that's from 15+ years ago.
-George