Help, advance mame and arcade monitor ? (pc crashed)

[DefJam]

Hi all,

Any guidance or help here.  I purchased a MAME machine from someone else a few years ago and it worked well until this past weekend.  The PC no longer boots, I believe the hard drive is making a beeping sound.

I'm not a complete Newbie to this scence but the one area I don't know anything about is DOS, AdvanceMAME and connecting to an arcade monitor.

Is anyone running advancemame that would be willing to share there set-up with me   Any idea's how to begin trouble shooting this ?

Thanks for any help.... (I promise not to buy another machine that I can't fix myself   )

Jim

[grantspain]

if you get no bios screen check first your voltages from psu,the fans are running,the ram is good,the graphics card is ok-the amount of bleeps you get on a pc denote where the fault lies-first thing i would do is reseat your ram and graphics card-next step swap the ram module,dont thinks its hard drive otherwise your boot screen would show no o/s system,you could be even looking at a motherboard fault-i had exactly the same fault on an artic thunder which turned out to be 3 caps on the motherboard had dryed out-due to the fact that some dimwit had left the case fan disconnected.happy hunting

[Antix]

have you tried plugging a standard PC monitor into it to see if anything displays on that? It might be that the machine is fine, but the monitor or connectors arent?

As for Advancemame setup, it is really dependant on your monitor type (pclock hclock etc) if you can find out this info, I may be able to help a little more.

[DefJam]

Thanks for giving me a place to start Antix and Grantspain.  I really had no clue.... guess I'll figure out how to build a PC by the end of this.

Now that you mentioned it... the computer had froze, so I opened the cab and wiggled (in hindsight probably a dumb move) the video card... at which point the scrreen did not look good.... hasn't booted since then.  I did reset the video card, sound card and hagstrom keyboard encoder, but no luck yet.

The monitor is getting some kind of signal as it does show some boot related text and an Aptiva boot screen when it first turns on  (I think, I'll have to check at home)... then goes black

[Antix]

Definately plug it into antoher monitor... it could be that just the vid card is bung, or, something small.... you may be able to recover the needed advancemame files off the machine.  If you can get the advmame.rc and, advmenu.rc if it is using it, then you are sorted.

[DefJam]

Antix,

Any risk of blowing up a normal monitor if the card is configured to go to an arcade monitor ?

I think I'm going to have some time to go play with it today.  Thanks.
Gotta love this community.

Jim

[Antix]

There is a slight risk. Most monitors (in my experience) wont display anything if they cant get a correct signal. However, this is just my experience.

What I could suggest, you say your machine is booting in DOS first? Connect it to a normal monitor, then press F8 (I think) and choose a step by step boot up. This gives you a chance to load everything one step at a time. Load the config.sys and the autoexec.bat, but when you get to the part that loads your front end, or Advancemame/menu, tell it no and dont load them. This will give you a DOS prompt instead of going into Mame and it shouldnt even get to the 15khz stage.

This is going on information that you have given me and old knowledge of DOS etc.

Once you are in DOS, you can then try navigating around to get the necessary files.

The main thing is to see if the machine boots really. Then you can work out if it is an AdvanceMame problem, or, a Machine problem.

Cheers

[DefJam]

I just wanted to say a quick Thank You to Antix and grantspain for their help.

I took the suggestion and finally got around to hooking up a normal PC monitor... sure enough it was sending me a message.  It was a BIOS error....  which I knew nothing about...   turns out the battery on the motherboard died.  So I know have a partially running machine again!

I have to hit escape twice for it too boot... not sure what's going on there, maybe its going to the wrong drive or something, but no big deal....   the odd thing is that my keyboard encoder is not working for anything going to my second player.... you would think this has to be a ground issue somewhere (for whatever reason the second player is wired to a different ground then the first), but I just can't find it.

Anyhow, thankyou Antix and grantspain!!!