For years, MAME struggled with the QSound DSP because the chip was "kabuki" (encrypted) or simply too complex to emulate at a low level without significant CPU overhead. To solve this, developers created an HLE approach. Instead of emulating every microscopic transistor pulse of the QSound chip, the HLE driver interprets the high-level commands sent by the game's code and translates them into audio that your modern PC can understand.
(High-Level Emulation), which uses higher-level code to simulate the sound chip efficiently. qsound_hle.zip archive contains the internal microcode (specifically the dl-1425.bin qsound-hle.zip mame
If MAME complains that qsound.zip or qsound_hle.zip is missing: For years, MAME struggled with the QSound DSP
Do unzip the file; MAME reads the contents of the archive directly. qsound-hle.zip mame