Mame annoying "pause" problem

[LeedsFan]

One of my projects has got an annoying problem where any game in Mame will just pause for a split second and then carry on. It happens on any game and seemingly at any time. It's really annoying and spoils the whole thing really. Most games are running at 100% (the classics anyway) but these should run flawlessly.

I've tinkered with the settings in mame but to no avail. I'm not even sure if it is anything to do with Mame. Please note this is not the old "sound stuttering" problem. It's as though the system needs to catch up with itself before continuing. I just wondered if anyone here had encountered this sort of thing before. I tried to search Google etc. but could only come up with the old sound stuttering problem.

[Thenasty]

whats the PC spec ?
what version of MAME ?


try lowering down the samplerate to 22 instead of 44.

[DashRendar]

I'd look at what's running in the background.

Antivirus scans, disk defragmenting, spyware, etc could be causing that symptom.

It could also be related to the I/O of the storage device (I assume it's a local hard drive).  Might try running a check disk on it, as well as a defrag.

Are you using keyboard encoding or analog controls?

[LeedsFan]

Well it looks like I solved the problem.  

The thing that puzzled me is that this machine worked fine before. Then I let it stand for a few months while I worked on other projects. I come back to the machine recently and it has "caught" this problem.

Basically I had this program on the laptop that checked for out of date drivers. It must have a cut off point after some months where it automatically assumes that some drivers must be out of date... and so it was spamming this message in the task bar. I never really noticed it before, but it must have been doing that in the background while Mame was running. Because the machine had not been connected to the internet and I'd not added any other software it had me puzzled as I'd not changed/added anything. I just disabled this program before starting Mala/Mame.

Thanks for the help though guys. These kind of problems can be the most annoying to pin down when they aren't directly Mame/frontend related.