MaLa w/ MAME + VBA Problem

[Kroz]

Hello all, I'm a newcomer to the forum and I'm hoping some of you could help me with a problem I'm having. I recently completed my MAME cabinet (Yaaay!), and everything was going smoothly; it has MaLa as a frontend, and is running Nesticle, VisualBoyAdvance, and MAME emulators (NES, GB(A), and Arcade ROMs, for those who don't know). It had no problems to speak of, until these past two days. For some reason, when you open MaLa for the first time and run a ROM, everything works great - but when you exit that ROM and try to load any others, they fail. This is true for MAME and VBA, but not for Nesticle. VBA just crashes outright, and gives one of those Microsoft send debug info / close program prompts. I put MAME into verbose mode, and received two Memory Access Violation errors. I lost the exact information, but if it's not a common problem I can pull it up upon request.

Here's the really odd thing, though... while MaLa is open, after running MAME or VBA through it once (after which running any ROMs, including the initial one, through MaLa, gives the error), even if I go through explorer or DOS and run MAME or VBA that way, it won't open! The programs themselves seem to be "locked" after MaLa has tried to open them; they just crash and get memory access violations / crash.

I don't know what to do; has anyone heard of this problem before? Or even better, does anyone know any solutions?

Thanks very much in advance, I hope this gets resolved quickly (it's pointless to have a frontend if you have to exit it after every game e.e;;

[Kroz]

Correction - after a few hours worth of trying every single possible combination imaginable, it seems to have something to do with my EMS USB2. I'm a bit confused as to why it would be a problem - it never presented one, *until I finished up the second player controller and plugged that in*.

Whenever I unplug the EMS USB2 and then run MAME, it works perfectly well. Whenever I plug it in and try to run MAME, it fails. Has anyone heard of such a problem before?

[Kroz]

Man, that was a doozy. Okay, sorry I posted and then solved it myself, but I'll put up the solution here in case anyone has a similar problem in the future.

The EMS USB2 was causing a problem - interestingly enough, switching the USB port it was plugged into *temporarily* solved the problem. Still not sure why that was...

I checked out the EMS USB2's website's driver info/FAQ, and they suggested turning on the Vibration option to support certain games. Well, I wasn't having problems with only certain games, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. What do you know, it worked. Setting the vibration on both controllers to "ON" somehow fixed a memory access problem that MAME was reporting. Go figure.

I hope no one else goes through the hours of headache I did over this