I think that you are going into mame4all's menu selector, not piplay's. Then when you exit, it's restarting piplay. When you say that it's 'older', is it like a grid of game images vs a vertical list of titles like normal?

If you are trying to get into the piplay list, you need to edit /home/pi/.profile
on the line that reads something like 'python launchmenu.py', you need to add the
--quicklaunch flag along with the item number. So it should read something like:
python launchmenu.py --quicklaunch 2 That tells piplay to skip the main menu and go straight into emulator #2 rom list (you may have to play around with it, I'm not sure if #2 is the correct number to use or not)

great! Marking as solved.