Mamehooker + mame .163 only loads blank screen

[lowlytech]

Running windows 7 64 bit.  Have Mame .163  64 bit /w HLSL enabled and mamehooker 5.1 Video card is GeForce GT630.  I have a strange issue.  I am using mamehooker only for marquee/instruction cards to display on a 7" monitor.  On bootup of the computer I will load mamehooker and then open a command prompt to manually run mame.  The first time it is ran, both displays will remain dark with no signs of activity.  Its only after I open task manager and kill the mamehooker process and relaunch it and rerun mame it will work flawlessly.  Anyone have any ideas as to why this might be having this startup glitch?  I followed Howard's instructions on his website for marquee configuration and the only glitch I had was it was griping about a richtx32.ocx file that was missing.  I downloaded and registered with regsvr32 without any more issues. 

[Howard_Casto]

There was a version of mame that tended to freeze upon the first initialization.  I'm not sure if it was 63 or not, but try another version and see if it helps.  If not try using the command line to send mamehooker a command first. 

A script with a goof in it can potentially cause this issue as well.  If you can somehow get mamehooker caught in a loop, mame will also wait infinitely for a reply that never comes. 

I'll be releasing a new version later this fall if that doesn't fix it. 

[lowlytech]

Thanks Howard for the reply.  I really appreciate your hard work on this great little program.

After troubleshooting a bit I was able to get mamehooker to work without the consistent first launch lockup.  I ended up downloading the latest nvidia drivers and this corrected the issues.  So it must have been something weird in the display driver.

Thanks again for your help and continued updates to your software.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah this is mamehooker specific, but I've got a video card in my collection that corrupts the first time a directX app is launched.  When you exit out of the app and restart it things work fine though.  You were probably experiencing something similar to that. 

I've noticed that windows "acts funny" when it's booting due to the dynamic loading that was implemented in XP and beyond.  Myself I'd rather just wait a few seconds for windows to boot and have it actually ready to run programs. 

[lowlytech]

Hey Howard was following up with this issue.  Apparently now that I am getting my front end tied together with everything I am experiencing this issue again where the first game you launch from mala will just hang when mamehooker is loaded.  I remember in my very early testing of everything I thought updating the video drivers fixed my issue, but I guess it didn't solve it altogether.  Currently running mame 169 on win x64.

[lowlytech]

After trying several different ways of loading mamehooker and mala and fighting focus stealing issues from delayed launch of mamehooker, it seems for the time being I am consistently getting mamehooker to work with mala on first launch by running mamehooker in a compatibility mode and having mala dos window set to minimized.  I don't know if some of these options could be deselected in compatibility options, but it seems to be working for the time being as is.  It is strange to note that executing mame from a command line manually never had the blank screen issue like I first got years ago, but now when using mala it seemed to have come back. For the time being hopefully this compatibility setting will hold.