is there someway M.U.G.E.N. can altered by itself or with an application to load it faster with a vast amount of characters & stages?

Mugen minimal system requirements: (Taken from the readme.txt)
System requirements
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Minimum: Pentium 90
Recommended: Pentium 200

M.U.G.E.N is not set up for maximum performance by default. See
"Speed Issues" (section IV) for information on how to optimize
this program for a slower computer.
It is hard to state exact memory requirements, as it varies
according to character and stage complexities. 32 MB should suffice,
although 64 MB is probably much safer. Simultaneous team battle
modes will require more memory, as it needs to load up more than
two characters. For larger characters, more memory will be required.

This helps, but memory usage varies on char to char. Some chars dont have too much coding or some char has tons of objects running around at the same time. So it depends and no one can say for sure. However, it is better to have more than enough.

Heres a shot of Task Manager

As you can see winmugen.exe is processing about 111MB of memory, when winmugen had 2 on 2 team battle in the first round.

*One very important thing to know about the memory usage of WinMugen*
That 111MB of memory, notice how I mentioned that it was in the first round. Well strangely, whenever you go into the next battle, that memory does not remain the same. In fact, it increases as you play more and more battles. In other words, the memory just stacks and piles, resulting high memory usage. The only way to release that memory is to completely exiting or closing winmugen.exe. If you open task manager yourself, and left it open and play winmugen as windowed, you'll see that the memory usage increases everytime you go into the next battle, or load more characters. In fact, when I was playing Survival mode, the memory usage increased up to 200MB or greater.

How to improve it your computer? Well obviously you can add more RAM if you have the extra memory slots, go for it.

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But if you dont wanna get more memory or you think you have enough memory, you can also try to configure mugen to run at optimal, meaning run at the most efficient as possible.

Open data/mugen.cfg with notepad. Scroll down to [Misc]

Change these settings as colored in red to help improve performance
Those are the major memory consumption. Another set of memory usage is the mugen game config settings. Still within the mugen.cfg, but these settings I wouldn't mess with too much because changing these settings may effect some char's that uses alot of mugen resources, such as the special effects like explods, projectile, and helpers. Changing these settings may affect the chars while they are in action. And in how, who knows, but they will and that's all you should know.

In mugen.cfg, scroll to [Config]

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Change your settings like this, and it should run at optimal performance. But if you are still having a memory issue or performance problem, it might be your computer specs. Keep in mind that this only helps reduce memory usage.

One of my older computer specs are:
AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1.8GHz, 768MB of RAM
I dont think AMD makes those processors in the market anymore... but it still can run mugen great