MaLa suddenly very slow to launch games

[editkid]

I've been thoroughly enjoying MaLa over the last few months, but now, seemingly out of the blue, games are taking about 30 seconds to launch. Any game, any emulator.

I've had a play with the debug log, and it simply says something like "Starting game" and then the next entry is 30 seconds later, me quitting the launched game, in order to time the load.

In the last week, the only things I've done are:

- Installed the Kega emulator
- Edited my custom layout a little to remove background images
- Switched to 1.475 BETA (to use MP4 video files from EmuMovies)

I've tried, without luck:

- Reverting to my earliest MaLa backup, with only M.A.M.E configured and the default skin
- Removing the Kega setup
- Using default layout
- Defragmenting my HDD
- Reverting to MaLa 1.74

It's worth noting that all the emulators load perfectly fine outside of MaLa or when using a different front-end. And I'm not running anything else apart from MaLa, pretty much.

I've spent days on this so far, and I've noticed that a few other people have mentioned slowness that only got sorted by reinstalling MaLa, which I'd like to avoid as then I'd have to do all the setup again.

  Any ideas? Help very much appreciated.

Edit: I've attached my MaLa log. Also, worth noting that games used to launch almost instantly.

[editkid]

Yesterday I tried installing a new copy of MaLa, but that one also had the game launch delay. I did set up a few things though, like M.A.M.E. with snap/movie dirs and my custom layout. I'll try again in the next few days with just MaLa default settings and a simple emulator with one game...

One thing that might be causing this - but shouldn't - is that I recently moved all my ROMs and artwork into a new folder, far away from where the emulators are installed (C:\EMU\ROMs and C:\EMU\Artwork whereas emulators are in C:\Program Files\etc.).

I'm also happy to run tests if anyone can think of anything I could try. Or post my MaLa config file? Really want this resolved, everything is set up, but this really ruins the whole setup, and it seems like a problem/bug that is reproducible. Must be something particular about my setup, as nobody else is having this. And it used to work super fine. And without MaLa the emulators still load super fast, so it's not general machine speed.

 

[drventure]

Hmm, Well just looking at the log, there's no -skip_gameinfo arg on the MAME command line, though I can't imagine that'd make a signifcant start up speed difference,

Is Mame still located in C:\Program Files\MAMEWAH\emulators\mame\

If you moved the roms etc, maybe you also moved mame but haven't changed the path in Mala config?

That's just a guess.

You might also check that you don't have any network shares listed in NetworkNieghborhood, though that usually only causes slow downs when browsing in explorer.

[editkid]

Yeah, M.A.M.E.'s in the right place, as eventually it does launch and play properly. It just takes roughly 30 seconds of staring at the "Starting..." dialog.

There's no mapped network drives or anything like that, but I will double check that angle. I did install a VNC server on the box, but disabling that didn't make a change to load speed.

Also, it's the same for any emulator, not just M.A.M.E. Also SNESW, Kega, Winkawaks, CPS3emulator...

[drventure]

Also, it's the same for any emulator,

That part's what leads me to believe it's not mala, but something that has changed with the system, that's causing the CreateProcess call (the API call Mala uses to actually start whatever emulator you're launching) to take so long.

Generally, things that cause that are
1) anti-virus packs, because they watch for any process launches and perform scans on the exe's being launched.
2) Viruses themselves, because they watch process launches and weedle their way into the process being launched to spread themselves
3) Anything else that might monitor the start and stop of processes in general, but on a mame cab, I can't think of much that would need to do that.

But, based on your comments, doesn't sound like there's going to be anything you can do to mala itself to speed that up.  It's something else...

Oh. Try this, Reconfig mala to point to NOTEPAD instead of mame, and just given it a bogus command line.

If notepad takes forever to launch, you know it's a system thing and not any kind of mala or mame config....

[editkid]

Great suggestions, thanks!

[drventure]

Good luck. If you find anything, post back.

I'm really curious what you find out... That's some very strange behavior...

[editkid]

Okay so...

- Installed antivirus software, did a scan, found two trojans... ha! Removed trojans.
- Notepad.exe set up in MaLa, launches super fast
- M.A.M.E. still taking 25-ish seconds to launch e.g. Cadash rom

Will investigate further tomorrow. I'm such a tool for not installing antivirus soft hah! Thanks again for the great suggestions.

[drventure]

You might keep looking at the virus angle. If you found 2 trojans, it's entirely possible something else has gotten onto the system as well. You might grab a copy of MalWareBytes and run a scan through it too.

Also check the dates of your emulator exes (Mame and whatever else you might use). If the dates are newish (ie newer than what they should be) chances are +something+ has touched them, which means I'd delete them and find new copies.

[editkid]

This morning when I booted up my machine everything was fast again! The trojans must have been active in memory after they'd been removed from the HDD.

Malwarebytes also found a few slightly odd registry entries and cleaned them up.

drventure, I can't thank you enough for your thorough advice. Case closed!

[drventure]

Thanks for the update..

Glad to hear that's resolved now.

[Gray_Area]

Supplementally: sometimes Mala takes much longer than loading via command line.

For example: if I load an AAE game (including artwork) via command line (or by bat file, essentially the same thing), it's almost instant. Mala takes about ten seconds.

[editkid]

I don't have such launching behaviour anymore since I weeded out the virus/trojan. And I don't have any security software slowing down process launches either.

Does it consistently take around ten seconds Gray_Area, or is it more erratic?

[drventure]

Weird. I'm wondering if Mala is "stopping" the video playback or performing some other "front end management" task before launching the game. Though I'd have no idea what it would be.

Have you tried turning on the debug log, starting mala, start a game, shut it all down and check the log for any peculiar timing delays? might be worth a shot.

[editkid]

For the record, does anyone know if there's a more thorough way of debugging/logging processes in Windows in general?

[drventure]

Well, there's a number of different ways to debug things in windows. The easiest all rely on having the source available, which mala doesn't make available.

Mala has a debugging log you can turn on which can be quite helpful sometimes.

I also use ProcessExplorer sometimes to see what's being spun up
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

Anything thing I use quite a bit is REGMON and FILEMON (also by Mark Russinovich). They're really good for logging what files/reg keys are being manipulated by processes. That'll sometimes give you an idea as to where to look.

After that, you get into using full on debuggers or ICE's, and I haven't done that in years, so I wouldn't be much help there.

The Mala log I've found quite helpful, generally.

You might check processexplorer to see if maybe it's having to go to a network drive for something. That could be slowing things down.

If the system has to perform a search for anything, that can slow thiings down considerably. Under normal circumstances, it shouldn't, but you never know....

[editkid]

That's really helpful drventure, thank you.