Blank Screen in Mame?

[Jamesbeat]

When I run Mame, I get a black screen.
I know the games are working, because I get sound and I can play the games blind.

I tried playing around with the video settings, and I found that when I switch to GDI, some games will work.

For example, if I have the graphics set to Auto, I get a blank screen with all games. If I set it to GDI, Bubble Bobble will display properly, but Ghosts n Goblins still gives me a black screen.

I know this is a problem with my onboard graphics, because when I run the exact same setup on a lesser computer that I have, it works properly even with graphics set to auto.

I have checked, and all of my drivers are up to date.

Are some integrated graphics simply incompatible with Mame, or is there something else I can try?

If it matters, I'm using 0.161.
I'm using this version because it was the most recent version that I could find a complete rom set for.

[JDFan]

Seems to usually be a renderer problem - some onboard GPUs do not  like using d3d try switching to ddraw instead rather than D3D or GDI.

[Jamesbeat]

Thanks for trying, but that didn't work.
 I found out what the problem was though - my Intel GMA 3100 graphics.

It seems that this particular graphics card (well, integrated graphics) was a bit of a problem child, and Intel kinda pretends it never existed. There's no drivers for it on their website, and a search just leads to people having problems with it, including blank screens when trying to play games.

This has a happy ending though. I actually had two machines, and it turns out that the processors are interchangeable.
I picked up some thermal paste from best buy and swapped the processors.

I'm now using what used to be the inferior machine with the faster processor. The integrated graphics work ok on this machine, so I'm in business.

This machine only has 2gb ram instead of four, (ufortunately the memory was not interchangeable) but I'll upgrade it if it seems necessary.

[aldub516]

for what its worth, i JUST had this problem while trying to rehab some older pcs.. for me, it was a direct draw issue..i simply opened my mame.ini, go down to windows video options and changed "d3d" to "directdraw"

#
# WINDOWS VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     directdraw
numscreens                1
window                    0
maximize                  1
keepaspect                1
prescale                  1
waitvsync                 0
syncrefresh               0
menu                      0

[Robbbert]

Direct Draw is no longer in the latest MAME. You could try opengl, but your old gfx card might not support that either. Your only choice then will be gdi.

Almost any Intel video more than a few years old will be blank with d3d. It's a side-effect of when HLSL was added.

[Jamesbeat]

GDI didn't work with my machine.
Well, it worked for a couple of games but not the vast majority of them..

I'm so glad that I happened to have two machines and was able to swap the processors, otherwise I'd probably still be wrestling with this.