Hi all, So I confirmed that there was only one sound card, so that's not the problem. Here's the weirdness: I started going through all the ini files for all the roms, and sure enough, in each one, the volume was set to -32 (which is functional zero). Now, I have NO idea how they got that way. I can certainly update them one by one and bring the volume to 0 (functional full volume) but I would love to know if there's a way to do that simultaneously for all my roms. Second, I'd love to know how that even happened. The roms were -fine- before, playing at full sound through mame, mameplus, and gameex (with mameplus backend). Then, the hard reboot, and now everything is set to volume -32. I mean. how does that happen??? Does anyone know what could have done that?? And how to prevent it? And again, how to batch fix all those roms? I'm sure glad I only have about 40! -D