How to change MAME rom names?

So, I have had in install MAME as a non-MAME emulator because I have not been able to get Mame to see my toms from within GameEx. (MAME works fine, however, as long as GameEx masquerades as a nonMame emulator.)

The problem is that the roms all show up as their unfriendly filenames, and I want them to show as their actual game names. I've tried making shortcut links to the roms and tried various ways of getting that to work. I've also tried simply renaming the roms--but that doesn't work, either.

Any ideas?

Thanks!