Dig Dug - after a while it locks out all controls

[nycjsw]

I have mame32.  I play Dig Dug a lot and I have 4 versions of it (2 are from Atari).   They all do the same thing.  I can play for hours at a time and even for a few days but after a while you go to play it and nothing will register.  It usually happens after you leave the game up and let it idle for a while on the demo screen.  You go to play it and the credit buttons won't work. Even with the keyboard you can't get it to do anything.  I have the save states function on so it ends up saving so you can't do anything but delete the rom and reload it.  Any ideas what I can do?  It is weird that it happens on every version of the game that I have?  If I turn the save states off I guess I could get around the problems but then none of my high scores would be saved.  If I could turn it off only for Dig Dug I guess I would take that hit.

Just to add it is not the controller b/c it only does it on this game and if you hit escape you can play any other of the 5K games I have.  During the NBA finals we played Dig Dug during half time and left it up.   After the game we went to play and the credit button would not register. 

[nycjsw]

Ok, I figured out that if I go into the control panel and do a soft reset it appears to start working again.  I guess I did not figure out why the problem occurs to begin with but at least I have an easy work around and can keep my high scores saved.

[NOP]

Just for kicks, I left digdug on for well over an hour on the attract mode and when I came back, it worked as expected.
I'm using mame 111 and the standard digdug.zip (so non atari).  I believe the only dipswitch I changed was to put it into cocktail mode, otherwise it should be default.

If you can reproduce the problem reliably, you should certainly submit the bug to mametesters, otherwise, match my setup and you should be fine.

[nycjsw]

Like I wrote earlier.  I can play the game for hours a day for a week with no problem but eventually it will start doing the same thing as described above.  So testing it for a few hours does not matter.  It has done it with all 4 versions of Dig Dug (2 Atari and 2 others).  Now that I found all I have to do is reset the game to get it working and I don't lose my high scores I'm ok with the problem.

[Namco]

I've seen a similar bug with Mame in general. I'm on Mame .120 with Mala as a front end. Every once in awhile the running emulation will just stop responding to button presses completely. I chalked it up to Mala acting funny until it happened even when I launched a game from the command line without Mala running. It happened in Donkey Kong, Street Fighter 2, and Galaga. After that I figured it was heat. I removed the panels on my computer case and it hasn't really happened as much. Maybe once in 10 plays. When it happens, I have to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and end the Mame32 session to get out. I can alt-tab out of the mame session and test that the controls are responding. When it happens, I see a quick flash of the screen like a video glitch or the application window frame being drawn and disappearing quickly.

It's pretty annoying. Not sure exactly what's causing it. I'm running a new AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 with onboard video, Nvidia GeForce 6100/nForce 430. Operating system is a custom lite build of XP, "experience". I mention it because the system specs may play a part in the whole mystery.

[nycjsw]

I've only had this happen with Dig Dug and I have like 5,000 other games on my system (about 20 I play a lot).  If I escape out of Dig Dug (that key works) I can play other games fine but if I try to go back into Dig Dug it still won't work.  Before I was having to delete the rom and reload it but now I found out I can just reset the game by hitting shift f3 from the keyboard.  This 2nd option allows me to save my high scores.  As mentioned before all 4 versions of Dig Dug do this?