Mame32 is a five year old program; it is mature, complex, and robust. However, since the Mame project itself is a documentation effort, and development is continuous, there will be times when changes to the core program effect Mame32. Since Mame32 is effectively a front end which passes user input from the GUI to the Mame[w] engine, any problems that occur in the Mame[w] engine will be inherited by Mame32. When problems do occur with a specific game in a specific version of Mame32, a previous version of Mame32 may be used easily, toggling off the Enable version mismatch warning check on the Options • Startup Options menu. Prior to reporting problems against Mame32, verify that the issue is not a known, core defect in Mame[w]. The Mametesters site is designed to track and report bugs in the baseline Mame[w] version. The current list of known Mame32 issues and defect tracking is available at Mame32QA.
ROMs Related Topics
If receiving missing
ROM error messages when attempting to run a game, secondary click on the game
in the list and choose properties, do an audit on that game [or use Alt-A]. The audit will determine which files are
missing from the romset currently being played.
Mame32 will not run a game which fails its internal audit.
Mame is an ongoing
documentation project. Sometimes old ROM sets are found to have miss-dumped,
missing, or damaged ROMs, which need to be replaced. As new versions of
Mame are released, the Mame developers add support for these new iterations of
ROMs, supplanting or renaming the old supported versions. Thus, often, older versions of ROMs which did
work in older versions of Mame32, will not work with newer versions of
Mame32 because they are now read as incomplete.
Mame32 utilizes
the idea of a parent / clone relationship for its games. If trying to
play a clone or a bootleg of a game, Mame32 will need the ROMs for the clone
game, and the parent set. Mame32 indicates the parent set of a
clone at the bottom of the game’s properties tab.
Mame32 utilizes
the idea of having single zip files to house the BIOS files for a large number
of similar games, the NeoGeo games for example, share four BIOS files in every
game. Mame will look to neogeo.zip as the BIOS zip, if this file is along
with the other NeoGeo games, it will use it. Otherwise, Mame32 expects
the BIOS files in every NeoGeo game. DECO cassette, CVS, and Playchoice are
also BIOS games. An error message will occur if the BIOS files are not
present and those games are run.
F5 / View
• Refresh in the GUI. (Do this anytime ROMs are altered, renaming, etc.)
Ensure the
appropriate folder view is toggled, i.e. 'all games' and it doesn't have
filtering on it to stop the display of the game being searched for.
Use the Options •
Reset to default menu choice and check all of the items, restart Mame32.
Final option,
manually delete the registry key for Mame32 by running regedit.exe:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Freeware\MAME32
Crash Related Topics
Delete the .hi,
.cfg, or .nv files for the game that's crashing.
Check to see that
the zip file is valid and that it's not corrupt or read-only.
The game’s entry
in the external database, hiscore.dat, may be causing the crash, remove the
entry by editing hiscore.dat with a text editor.
If crashing
during an audit or an [F5] refresh, it could be a corrupt .zip file.
Extract it and re-zip. Pkunzip -t *.zip. Note the file that dies during
the audit and concentrate on that one. Also verify that if zip files are not
used, that the folder is not empty, or contains partial or damaged ROMs.
If seeing crashes
or weird screen coloration, try disabling running background apps [in Win98,
use msconfig.exe], Norton Crashguard, popup killers, viruscans, fast find, the
Microsoft Office Bar, Intellimouse, even IE subscription updates, etc. Try
moving Mame32 away from compressed [DriveSpace, DoubleSpace, stacker] drives.
IntelliMouse and Office Toolbars have been known to cause conflicts. Also
disable items in the system tray, like the CD player, etc. It may also be
necessary to download and install the latest version of DirectX from Microsoft
to prevent some errors.
Some recent
viruses which attach to .exe’s will cause page faults and access violations in
Mame32 when it's run. Use an anti-virus check and verify Mame32 is not
infected.
Use the Options •
Reset to default menu choice and check all of the items, restart Mame32.
Final option,
manually delete the registry key for Mame32 by running regedit.exe:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Freeware\MAME32
Performance Related Topics [sound scratchiness and stuttering]
Mame32 will start
to crackle, scratch, or echo if the game running is too taxing for the
processor [Taito F3, Midway Wolf Unit, CPS2 games require a lot of
horsepower]. This can be visually confirmed by turning on FPS display
with [F11], and frame skip to auto with [F8]. If the FPS
dips anywhere or frame skipping rises anywhere during the game play, the game
is maxing out the CPU and sound breakup could occur. The new blitter effects
[partial scanlines, RGB effects] will impose further strain on the CPU, upwards
of 50%. As a data point, an AMD Athlon 1900 XP is able to do all current
Mame32 games [.58] at greater than 100% fps at a resolution of 1600x1200x32
using RGB effects [the most stressful Mame32 settings]. Feed Mame32 as
much hardware as possible. Suggested
Mame32 settings are available on the Mame32QA site.
If seeing a severe slowdown in games that historically
didn't, ensure that the Use less CPU time if possible menu item is toggled off
in Options • Default Options • Miscellaneous. This happens to laptop
users particularly.
Joysticks and Gamepad Related Topics
Gamepads and
mouse are disabled by default on first Mame32 launch, enable them by toggling
their check boxes on in Options • Default Options • Controllers.
Mame32 relies on
DirectInput for joystick support, ensure the game pad is seen as present and
active in the game controller control panel: start menu • settings • control
panel • game controllers.
Verify the
joystick is seen as ID #1 in the game controllers control panel rather than
being assigned a higher number. If using multiple gamepads, ensure each
one has its own ID#.
Daisy chained
gameport Microsoft Sidewinders [original] in Win2k do not work very well.
Use USB gamepads instead. Single Sidewinders may also cause odd behavior like
ghost button presses.
GUI Related Topics & Miscellaneous Tips
If seeing icon
palette corruption in the GUI when returning from a full screen game, try
increasing the desktop color depth to 24bpp or 32bpp.
Quickly navigate
through games in the details view by simply typing the name of the game, the
highlight will jump to that game and become more granular as the name is typed
out.
Select a random
game with [Ctrl-R].
If Stretch using
hardware is grayed out in Options • Default Options • Advanced, verify the
desktop is set to 16bpp or 32bpp and not 24bpp.
If it is still grayed out, the video card does not support the hardware
stretch capabilities Mame32 needs.
If there are
screenshots in the \snap directory and the default Mame image is the only thing
being displayed in the screenshot area on the right, Mame32 is currently
toggled into another art mode. Click the screenshot area to toggle
between: screenshot, flyer, cabinet, marquee views.
The GUI text may
disappear from the folder view if the GUI font color chosen is very close to
the Windows system background color scheme.
To alleviate
screen tearing in some scrolling games, it is necessary to check use triple
buffering and match game refresh rate, while setting refresh to ‘auto’.
This will set the output monitor’s refresh rate down to 60Hz or the closest the
monitor can do to the game’s refresh rate.
Sometimes due to
the Windows system background color scheme chosen, some small black ‘dots’ can
display on the Mame32 icons in large icon view. Try a different Windows
color scheme ‘window’ setting.
Vector games like
asteroids look and work better if hardware stretch is disabled. Increase
the gamma to 2, and force a resolution like 1024x768x32.
If seeing
corruption in the screenshot/flyers/cabinets images, resize the viewable
area. Mame32 decimates the image if the area to display the image in is
too small, resulting in colored patterns. [increase the viewable screenshot
area by turning off status bar, and toolbar, or widening/heightening the
screenshot pane].
If having trouble
saving keyboard mappings and configuration, verify that the *.cfg files are not
read-only and that a \mame32\cfg directory is present.
If the in-game [TAB]
menu no longer working or can’t be accessed. It’s been mapped it accidentally
to another key; delete the default.cfg file in the \mame32\cfg directory.
Some of the
largest games supported by Mame32 [NeoGeo mainly] can run into the hundreds of
megabyte range when they are uncompressed into memory, this combined with
Mame32 in memory, plus OS overhead can lead to very slow performance as Windows
swaps the information out to disk if there is not enough physical memory.
256M or 512M is recommended for all current games [.58].
The screenshot
area was grayed out in Windows XP because of the inclusion of a preliminary
file in Mame32 version .54 called Mame32 manifest. Remove that file to
view the screenshot area artwork again.