Actually as long as the zip is called cheat.zip & is full of xml files it should be kept zipped, perhaps its inside the cheats.zip, anyway the cheat.zip should be kept as it is in the Mame dir, there's tons of xml files with the cheats inside it & Mame reads them from .zip. If the cheats.zip has all the xml files in just rename it to take the s off the end & it should be fine.