emulator keeps closing or minimizing during play

[oskywawa]

I have built my first MAME / MESS machine and have begun toying around now with Hyperspin and various emulators.  I loaded up Nestopia and all of my buttons for the control panel I built seem to work correctly, but while playing the emulator will sometimes minimize, sometimes the toolbar across the top of it will appear, etc.  I am not sure where to even start to figure out what the issue is.  Does this sound like a software issue?  Or does it sound like the sort of thing that would be caused by accidentally key presses to a keyboard or other buttons on my control panel someone registering that they are being pressed.  Any tips on a process of elimination to go through to sort this out would be greatly appreciated.  Link below to my build (not 100% updated but pretty close).

www.arcadebuild.com

[BadMouth]

You are probably hitting some combination involving CTRL or ALT

First I'd try disabling hot keys in windows, but if those keys have some function in Nestopia, it won't help.
If possible, change your encoder to not use those keys.

Why those are included as default keys and people continue to use them is beyond me.

[the_gamer]

BTW: Those keys are also default buttons in mame ... even if everybody in here knows it I guess.

[Howard_Casto]

Why those are included as default keys and people continue to use them is beyond me.

You might try reading the_gamer. 

The default keys are left over from the DOS days.  Back then that key mapping was the default for many games, including Doom.  But then games were played in DOS, and ctrl and alt didn't do anything so it was harmless.  IMHO it should have been dropped the instance pc games could be played natively in windows. 

Why they are still being used to this day is beyond me.  It's one of those deals where it's best to do things correctly from the start because bad habits die hard. 

[oskywawa]

Thank you so much for the feedback here guys!  I will definitely be looking into this the next chance I get to work on my machine.  I'll post back after I have had a chance to try these suggestions out!

[bizkonson]

yeah i had the same problem as well,
tried to disable hotkeys in regedit that worked for some ppl but that didnt work for me.
i got an advise just to remap the default ipac buttons that solved the problem but then you have to remap it in the emulators as well 

but still this way no more alt and ctrl and so on...