Dave,(posted 9610 days ago)In theory, having a config file present when recording should not affect the playbackability of a recording.
ie: The cfg settings you used for the recording are stored into the inp file and these settings are used for playback purposes - not whatever settings you may have in a .cfg file on the machine you're playing the recording back on.
As far as the .hi files go, these have been ignored for some time now by Mame when recording games. This change was done due to the number of games that use the current high-score table as part of the seed for their random elements.
Cheers, BeeJay.