Mamewah giving me fits

[chemame]

Okay, after two years on AdvanceMenu, I've finally seen enough about Mamewah to want to give it a try. I figure why not run both concurrently? Well, the "why not" is becoming sheer frustration.

Has anyone experienced a problem where the video goes to black when a game is selected? The rom is obviously running, as I can hear it running. However, nothing I do will restore video. I can get Task Manager through CTRL-ALT-DEL, and I can even see Mame and Mamewah running... everything looks normal there, but nothing responds to END TASK. If I cancel Task Manager I am left with still the black screen & rom sounds. I actually have to select SHUTDOWN-RESTART (which happens just fine, no need for hard reboot) to restore everything.

The thing is, it doesn't happen every time. The first time, it happened on my Atari 2600 set (stella), so I just figured I had something wrong on the commandline params for stella (stella itself works, has been working for years through AdvanceMenu).

Mame was working fine, but then last night after 2 or 3 roms loaded fine, I tried 1942 and it went to black, just sounds, same story. Had to reboot. Don't know yet if it will happen with 1942 everytime (i.e. rom/video mode specific), or if it's more random. Haven't looked at it since -- it was late, my wife was giving me the "how much longer" look.

Anyway, I know there's a mamewah videomode configuratorator. Is there something I must do, or something I should try, to correct this? I've always been fortunate, in that every single rom worked in every single emulator through AdvanceMame with no special settings for video mode for any of them.

So while I'm real impressed with the interface (trackball game selection ROCKS), this black video problem is frustrating me more than a little.

Thoughts? Thanks!

Chemame


SORRY - forgot to give specifics about my system:

Athlon XP 2400+ / 768MB / GeForce4MX-128MB / W2K
Mamewah: 1.61
AdvanceMenu: 2.46
MAME (not variant): 0.92
MAME roms: 0.92
Stella (not stellaX): 1.3 (?)

All emulator & rom paths IDENTICAL between Mamewah & Advancemame.

Thanks, and God bless!

[screaming]

Has anyone experienced a problem where the video goes to black when a game is selected? The rom is obviously running, as I can hear it running. However, nothing I do

  The most common reason for this is the emulator losing "focus", meaning, even though it looks like it's the top-most application, it doesn't think so.

   You want to mess around with the safemode/nosafemode option in your emulator.ini in MAMEWAH.  If that doesn't fix your problem, you'll have to resort to the "X-mouse" Windows PowerToy, which I use and never have a problem.

-sab

[jcrouse]

Check out the downloads/ini files section on my website to get emulator specific settings for your ini files. Although as per you example I don't use Stell, I use a hacked version of Z26 which is also available on my site.

John
http://home.comcast.net/~cpviewer

[chemame]

jcrouse -

Just to give credit where credit is due... Your website is the reason I am trying out Mamewah. I saw a link about emulators hacked to use ESC to exit, and I have always been bugged about FCEUltra because of that... and I followed the link and saw all these REALLY SEXY skins for Mamewah, and I thought -- ok, I'd give up scrolling through screenshots if it meant the interface looks THAT damn good.

Truly, that has always been the one thing AdvanceMenu does that nobody else seems to want to do -- allow grid-layout scrolling through screenshots. Sometimes it can make it much much faster for me to find a game. But it still doesn't justify passing up such a sexy look.

So anyway all that to say, thanks for you INI files, I am using them already. And, since you seem to know my setup inside and out, I may take your advice and go for Z26 instead of Stella -- not that I suspect Stella to be the problem, as I got the same blackness on Mame.

Screaming -- thanks for the suggestion on SAFEMODE... I will definitely try that. Wish me luck. I want this FE so bad I can taste it 

Chemame

[quarterstringer]

I had a similiar problem, my 2 year old son was the only one to cause it though. Since the load game button was the same as the start button, he would push the credit and start buttons repeatedly before the game loaded and the screen would go black.

I also had to remap the buttons so the ALT was eliminated. He would hold the ALT button down while loading a game and I would see the screen collapse and go black.

This probably isn't your problem unless you're like my 2 year old

[chemame]

Nope, already mapped START to a different button, and there's no ALT on my keywiz

Good to know so many people have seen something similar though. Gives me a really good feeling to know it's probably not some quirky insurmountable hardware problem.

Chemame

[chemame]

Screaming, JCrouse, you guys rock.

safemode fixed me up. Works GREAT... and with all those nice-looking skins... WOW...

THANKS AGAIN. What a great forum!

[jcrouse]

FYI...There is a MameWAH forum at
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=arcadeospc2jamma

Enjoy,
John