Mala problems; can't launch Mame

[jlfreund]

I'm not able to launch a MAME game.  The games show up in the menu and I can select them, and it seems to lauch my Mame108.exe correctly with the ROM file argument, because then I see a DOS window popup for a split second and see some messages scroll by too quick to read. It looks like it says it's extracting parts from the zip.  Of course the roms I try all work fine from the command line.  But then after the DOS window closes, I'm back in Mala with no sign of a mame process running.

I've been trying to setup Mala (latest is V10Rc7a) for a while and keep running into strange problems.   Like crash when you enable sound, crash when I edited mala.ini to set HideAll from 0 to 1, and many others.

Mala kind of needs it's own English forum to make it easier to search for answers.  I've tried sending email to the author once, but didn't get a response.  It's popular enough that it deserves a permanent new forum on this site, as well as a link to the English forum from the Mala website. 

I think Mala would be a good candidate for open source.  It's mature enough to not get pulled in different directions, it has the interest of a lot of people who probably have programming skills, and could really benefit from multiple contributors as there are many bugs that appear to be simple, if only there were lots of contributors who could help could reproduce and address all the strange combinations of state that lead to problems.

Jason

[gamecreature]

Start here:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=56010.0

[jlfreund]

I was able to get more information by trying to launch the game about 50 times, letting the flashing text burn into my eyeball until I can read it.

The message I get in the DOS window when launching astroi1 from game from the Mala menu is:

035127.01: NOT FOUND
035143.01: NOT FOUND
035144.01: NOT FOUND
035145.01: NOT FOUND

ERROR: Required files missing, the game cannot be run

---

Anyway, from that I was able to figure out some rom-related path was messed up.  It's odd that setting a Mame Config -> Rom Path to the correct path is not sufficient.  What I had to do was go to Mame Config -> Mame Executiable/Config -> Folder -> Roms and also set  the path there.  I don't know the difference between those two settings.

Anyway, it works now. 

I'd still love to see Mala put up on SourceForge.  Roughly every 3 times I change something and rerun now, I get a windows errors of the form "Mala has encountered a problem and needs to be closed.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.  Debug/Close".  No errors are logged in the Mala.log for these, but Opening a session in Visual Studio, I see lots of accesses to memory location 0.  Luckily, these errors are not fatal, and dismissing the dialog allows Mala to run normally.

Jason

[loadman]

Anyway, from that I was able to figure out some rom-related path was messed up.  It's odd that setting a Mame Config -> Rom Path to the correct path is not sufficient.  What I had to do was go to Mame Config -> Mame Executiable/Config -> Folder -> Roms and also set  the path there.  I don't know the difference between those two settings.

Mala needs the rom path to make a game list

Mame needs the rom path to run games (from whatever FE)