Black screen in MAME, sometimes.

[obliterator]

This is happening in GameEx and Acade Edition.

Occasionally when starting a game, it will just be black, but the sound works. Usually we can exit and restart, then it works okay. But sometimes once it goes black, we can never get a display back, and have to either use Alt+F4 to quit hard, which doesn't always work either.

In the attached log, the first time I tried to run 1945kiii it did this. The log indicates that after I exited MAME (which I could not see), there is an message about "Display is running in full screen compatibility mode." I am not really sure what this means, but the second time I tried to run it, it worked fine, and that message did not appear after exiting MAME.

I have already tried forcing windowed full screen (GameEx), removing HideOS, etc, and none of that made a difference.

The PC is dedicated for a cab. It's got a fresh OS install and nothing but the system/video drivers installed, along with MAME and GameEx. When I first noticed this happening, I had not yet installed the AMD drivers for the integrated Radeon video in the 3400G. So I installed the AMD drivers, but nothing changed.

Again, this affects GameEx and GameEx Arcade Edition. I really love Arcade Edition and want this to work. If I could at least always exit MAME when it doesn't show video and try again, that would at least be workable for my family, but sometimes we can't get that to work either, and the kids yell "Daaaaaad" and I have to pull the keyboard out and.... well. :-)

log.txt GameEx.ini

[obliterator]

In case this is a driver/card issue, I put a GTX 670 in there (NVidia instead of AMD). Same thing. I can pretty consistently get a black screen on that game every few tries. Just now, I did it and got stuttering audio in the background while it was black. I was able to exit.

I'm using MAME 0.215.

[obliterator]

After I got a black screen (from which I could only reset the PC), I used runitgame.bat outside of GameEx over and over again over a dozen times, and the game started up fine every time.

I noticed one time that as GameEx was launching the game, it played the game start sound (from Galaga?) and then that sound started stuttering before things appeared to lock up. 

Also, I tried forcing MAME to use GDI, and when I did, it worked fine from GameEx every time. However, this is not acceptable for a variety of reasons, primarily because of the lack of hlsl.

So this leads me to ask if there is a way to delay MAME's startup a couple of seconds while GameEx closes its d3d windows? In case there is some kind of fluke with the timing?

[obliterator]

So. I do not like HyperSpin. I don't want to use HyperSpin. But as a test, I tried this with HyperSpin+RocketLauncher. The game ran every time without a black screen. I would test using RocketLauncher for GameEx but I don't know if that is even possible. The good news is that it means it should be fixable, whatever it is.

Tom, I am a software developer by trade and I develop Win32 applications, some using DirectX, for a living... if you would like some back-and-forth on this to help diagnose/fix, please let me know. I'm game. I've been using GameEx in a cab for almost 8 years. We love it. It's time for a refresh and I just need to get past this little issue. :-)

[obliterator]

I downgraded GameEx to 15.73 and the problem is totally gone.

I can't find the last 15.x version of GameEx Arcade Edition.  Where can I download previous releases?