Any ArchadeOS guru's on here.

[mandanny66]

Guys.

I've been asked to look at a tabletop machine, which won't start up.

It turns out that it's a very old pentium PC inside the cabinet, connected to a CRT screen via a Jama interface.

It's been stood for quite some time,  the cmos battery is flat, so the PC lost it's bios settings, and was sitting there awaiting an input to reconfigure the bios.
I've replaced the cmos battery and now the system boots up, I have sound and I'm presented with an ArchadeOS games list.

However, It doesn't matter which game I choose to play, a dialogue appears saying "Running Game Name", the screen goes black and after a few seconds it dumps me back to the AOS game list.

Unless someone else has messed with the AOS config before me, then I'm guessing the issue lies somewhere in BIOS.

Any ideas where to start ??

[Titchgamer]

It wont be anything to do with the BIOS that is just config and set up for the actual PC.

I am no guru on your FE but based on the info you have provided above I would guess it is something to do with the targeted location of the roms themselves.

By that I mean the FE thinks the Roms or the emus are in a certain location and can not find them.

So i would check that first personally.

[mandanny66]

The odd thing about that is, I'm told it worked fine until it went in to storage.
If I drop to a dos prompt, I can see the zipped up roms, so I assume that the HDD is OK and not become corrupted.

[Titchgamer]

Intresting...

Has a config or txt file been lost or corrupted possibly?

Does it have more than 1 hdd that may of been lost from the BIOS?

[mandanny66]

Not that I can see.
I'm just looking at mame.cfg to see if it's pointing to the correct location for roms, however, it's highly unlikely that the lady in question would have touched this.
She wouldn't even know where or how to find dos.

[Titchgamer]

Afraid I cant help any more with this hopefully someone with more knowledge than me on this can point you in the right direction :p

[mandanny66]

I hope so too.

I looked at mame.cfg and the rom loaction is rompath = .;roms
I chnged this to c:\mame\roms, but it still does the same so I changed it back.

I'm still geared towards a bios setting if i'm being honest, due to it working OK prior to going in to storage.
Maybe something to do with memory or shadowing but i've tried all sorts of combinations and can't find anything.

[mandanny66]

Digging a little deeper in ArcadeOs config, there's a setting to echo on screen.
I can now see a mame command, its at this point the screen flickers and chucks me back to AOS.

So maybe it's a Mame issue.

[PL1]

Have you tried manually launching a game from the MAME directory DOS prompt?

Code: [Select]

cd c:\mame   (change directory to the MAME directory)
mame pacman  (launch Pac-Man)
Also, you might find more ArcadeOS info in the DOS/WinCab sub-forum.   


Scott

[mandanny66]

I tried various methods of launching manually, without success, but to be honest, I'm assuming that it's because i'm dropping out of AOS in to a Dos Shell.
However, when I do so, nothing happens, it comes back to the prompt.

if I change directory to roms and then dir, i get a huge list of zip files, probably a few thousand, so it seems the roms are there

[Titchgamer]

Sounds like a problem with mame itself then.
Do you know what version it is running? Could you give it a fresh install to try out?

[mandanny66]

Maybe I'll shove the HDD in a real PC, something I can use windows to see whats going on, and maybe find the version numbers.

[yotsuya]

This might sound dimb, but did you reset the clock?

[mandanny66]

I did reset the clock. One thing which crossed my mind was whether or not 2016 was too far in the future.
However, I popped the HDD in my PC at home and tried to run Mame from a cmd window.
The window hung, I couldn't quit NTVDM and had to reboot my PC, this happened several times.

I scoured some of the text files and discovered it was 037-beta16_dos.
037-beta16_dos wasn't available on the mame site, but i did manage to find it elsewhere.
I copied just mame.exe, and then tried again, it no longer hung my PC. It did complain about various things, but didn't hang, which was better than the earlier attempts.

I brought the drive back in to work this morning, refitted it in the console, and it's working again.

I love my job.

[Titchgamer]

Glad you sorted it

Crazy how files can be corrupted or deleted seemingly without anyone touching them isnt it? Lol

[mandanny66]

The two Mame.exe files were a few bytes different in size, but then I guess they might not have been 100% identical revisions.

The console is now in our canteen until the owner decides what she wants top do with it.