Chris_Williams

This is mine built from scratch based on Webb's design. This is about 2 years ago when it had a 20" monitor which has since been replaced with a 27" tv. As well the entire comp has been rebuilt to include an AMD athalon64 3800, GeForce 7100, 512 Mb ram, 40GB SATA HDD, and a new 500w P/S.

When I wired up the encoder and set all the keys it ran with no problems. I think the problems mainly occur for me because my 4 year old (well 5 today) has to sit on a stool in order to play. With the coin up buttons on the back of the control panel (for cleaner look) it may be possible that while he is leaning over the panel he is accidentally hitting a bad button combo that is causing this. The more I thought about this I realized that it has only happened when he is playing. Anyway long and short of it is alt is getting moved to a different button and we will see if that doesn't solve this issue.

Well it's been running with a MAME game paused (no keystrokes) for 2 days with no black hole. I am really starting to believe it's got something to do with the alt key.

Pretty sure this is only when running a MAME game on mine. I am running the controls through an ultimarc keyboard encoder and and ultimarc gamepad encoder. The last time it happened I pluged a keyboard into the encoder and flipped the switch, used Alt/tab and was able to get back into the game my son was playing. Did a little looking around and found that P1 button 2 is left alt. I am not sure if there is a series of button presses that is causing this but I will continue to search and maybe reconfigure the controls. Altough there is a part of me that doesn't think this is the case since it has happened while playing GT which doesn't use any of the P1 or P2 buttons. I feel your pain on rebuilding your machine I replaced everything and did a fresh install on a brand new HDD to try to get rid of this. I also installed some serious cooling fans 2-120mm 120vac industrial fans really loud and pushes alot of air, thinking that maybe my video card was getting too hot. Anyway I as well have the power saver set to always on and widows screen saver disabled. I have never noticed it going black when it was not running mame through Gameex.

I am having the same problem, what is a "tracker" and how do I get rid of it?