One more thing: can you detail YOUR DOS box setup? Memory managers, etc, please, so I can have a guideline.
It's not really much of a DOS setup, It's a win98 drive that I've booted to DOS mode. It's got no autoexec.bat file and no config.sys file. Consequently, there is no sound on my DOS setup, but the DOS sound works under the Win98 command prompt.
You can safely delete the .nfo files and try running it again to see if it'll repeat the info about the arcade mode.
Based on the log file, I think I've narrowed down the problem to where Kymaera is setting up info to be displayed about the current game.
Try generating a game list for mame in Ky_cfg. After you generate a "Master" game list, you still need to load it. And remember to give the gamelists the ".xml" file extension. (I know, I should do it automatically)
Then, select all your games, and click the "Copy selected games from source to dest" button, then click the "Remove games not in Rom Dirs" button, and save out your gamelist, then add it as a game list to your emu setup.
Let me know how it goes, I'll try to figure out where it could be crashing in the SetupGameSpecific function.
Thanks agin for testing so much.
-PMF out