I don't know if this issue has been reported before but seems that all the handheld games using LCD technology (with the exception of the Chess simulators and maybe some few others) fail to show the game graphics, this happens with and without the artworks, the screen remains blank (white background with no shapes on it) but I can clearly hear the sound of the game running. The LED games instead runs well and the graphics is correctly shown and animated.
This is verified on OSX 10.14.6 and latest SDLmame build compiled declaring the options target=mame subtarget=mess with latest Xcode and MacPorts environment.

Might be a BGFX issue, have you tried -video soft or -video opengl?

Same issue, and when I declare "-video soft" the OSD menu does not appear at all then on the exit console (terminal window) I read the following message:

2019-09-30 21:26:08.386 mess64[1065:37888] WARN:

Assertion failure at SDL_DestroyTexture_REAL (/Users/valve/release/SDL/SDL2-2.0.10-source/src/render/SDL_render.c:3144), triggered 1 time:
'texture && texture->magic == &texture_magic'

I can't help (Windows user), but could give some pointers.
Do VFD games work? try edracula or astrocmd.

If not, since you compile your own version, try decreasing the screen size in the driver. It tries to create a 2048*2048 texture, maybe it's too large for your system. For example, driver has:
screen.set_size(1421, 1080);
try:
screen.set_size(1421/4, 1080/4);

Just tried, the VFD games works fine, I can see the animated coloured graphics on top of black background.
My system is equipped with a Radeon RX580 with 8 Gb VRAM, it is a 2010 MacPro with dual 3.20 GHz Xeon quad core CPUs and 48 Gb of DRAM total, I can try a new compile (of course) but shouldn't those specs big enough for any demanding task including graphics?

Yeah, it doesn't look like a texture size problem.
The VFD games use the same implementation as the LCD games(SVG screen), the only difference is the background color on most of the Game & Watch. Do gnw_dkjrp and gnw_mbaway work? These have black background.

This is fun, here are the results:

gnw_dkjr : Same behaviour as above, white screen and nothing but in game sounds
gnw_dkjrp : The graphics works well but in negative (black background and white shapes)
gnw_mbaway : Same as gnw_dkjrp, graphics OK, white characters on black background

Yup, the graphics are supposed to be inverted for these 2 games.

You're certain it's not caused by the MAME artwork system? eg. temporary rename the artwork package for gnw_dkjr to gnw_dkjr2. If it works ok then the problem is the way artwork is rendered on MacOS. If not, it's caused by the SVG white background somehow.

And you were saying the chess simulators are fine? Not many SVGs used there, off the top of my head: ssystem3, mchess, savant, ccmk5. These are all with a white background.

I have tried to rename the artwork above as you suggested with the same result: white background and no visible characters.

About the chess games I was referring to Mephisto machines, the group you mentioned suffer from the same issue of Game & Watch, the LCD part of the screen remains blank.

the ddraw and gdi fallbacks on Windows used to exhibit similar broken behavior with certain layouts, maybe some other output modes (used on OSX) are doing the same?