Help, please

[dipdog]

sorry to ask this really lame question
I've got the latest versions of mame and mala on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 760MB of RAM running XP Pro Version 2002, service pack 3.
I had all the necessary files, a complete ROM set, and it was running great.  Then I had to reinstall Windows when it got corrupted (my four year old was turning it on/off, on/off, mashing the buttons). 
It's been a couple of years since the first time I installed it, so I had to read up on how to install everything again.  There's several online step-by-step guides for mala and mame.  I've read a couple of them, unpacked mame, created the mame.ini file, I've tried both the new mame.ini file and my old mame.ini which I still had, installed mala, associated mame with mala and associated it with the ROMS folder and my old controls.ini file.  But every time Mala starts now, I select a game with the slickstik controller, it sits there and nothing happens.  I can go through the whole list of games, all of which used to work, but none of them start now.  No warnings or errors.  It just pauses likes it processing, and then a few seconds later goes back to the cursor.
So, I'm baffled.  It used to work.  I'm using all of my old files.  There's not a lot of steps to installation, so I'm not sure what I could be screwing up. 
Appreciate any advice for troubleshooting! 

[empardopo]

I think that your computer is very old to run the last version of mame, don't?

First, you must "install" mame on your computer. Check if you can play and then setup your controls.
Only when the first point is OK you can proceed to configure MALA.

Let's go step by step!

Note: Perhaps you are using old roms with the latest version of mame.

[BadMouth]

Does MAME work outside of Mala?

[dkersten]

To find out what is going on is to have the command window not minimized, then change your mala command to mame.cmd instead of mame.exe, create a text file and save it as mame.cmd in your mame folder, and put the following lines in it: 

Code: [Select]

mame.exe %1
pause
exit
Now launch mala and run a game, when it fails the command window will stay on top until you press a key and you can see what the error is.

Once you have it figured out, either change your mame command in mala back to mame.exe or just remove the pause from the .cmd file.  Personally I like using the .cmd file because it allows you to add other commands when launching mame.

Also I second the question of whether mame is working standalone.  I found that the latest mame (.154) uses "auto" for the video mode, and sometimes that doesn't work well with your graphics card and you just get a black screen or an error pops up (that you can't see because the command window is minimized or just too fast to read) and it just fails.  So try it from a command prompt (go to your mame directory, do mame pacman  (or whatever game) ) and see what happens.  Also don't forget to have directx 9.0c runtime installed, and if you have hlsl enabled, make sure mame is launching in d3d mode.  You might also just need to go back to an earlier mame version for it to really work well with XP.

[dipdog]

thank you all!
It was something totally different.  I'm not computer literate enough to know a ton, but was mostly confused because it WAS working, then it wasn't.
I forgot a couple things that happened in between, though.  The computer kept rebooting randomly either while it was booting or just after.  So, I went in to bios, and saw "optimized defaults", and thought "what could go wrong?".  I lost the monitor after selecting that, couldn't see anything.  So I pulled the battery out of the motherboard to reset bios.  But I didn't realize that would also erase the drivers.  And what it looks like now is that mame won't work because there's no VGA driver
Sorry, I guess that was a lot of things that happened in between.  I got a driver, tried to reinstall it but haven't had any luck; dunno why.  Probably beyond my level, so I think I'm gonna give up and just get buy a new P4 on craigslist, and start over.
I was a little confused about the comments about a p4 being too slow for newer versions of mame?  I thought that was the whole point of mame, was that it could easily run on a slower, older system? 
Anyhow, again really sorry I led everyone down the wrong trail, but thank you for the replies!

[DaOld Man]

Does your PC have onboard video and a video card?
Is monitor plugged into the video card?
If yes to both questions, then you may have to plug monitor into onboard vga plug then change video setting from onboard to pci video card in bios, save bios, shut computer down.
Then switch monitor back to video card and boot up.
I have seen this happen before.
Ive never heard of resetting bios erasing any drivers, but it wil may change default video to on board, if you have onboard video.