[RESOLVED] Game returns to GameEx after a few seconds of playing

[Gildahl]

Hi Tom,

I'm on 16.73 and hadn't played Defender in a while.  So after starting it up and starting to play the screen went blank and returned me to GameEx.  After exiting GameEx I found MAME/Defender was still running.  So I exited everything (including computer restart) and tried again and could repeat this reliably.  It seems to only happen after I start mashing buttons on my CP and not if I just let the game sit there.  Anyway, I tried going back to rev. 16.62 and was able to reproduce it there too (must not have played Defender under that rev).  Then I went back to 16.54 at which point I found I could not reproduce the problem.  So I suspect something happened between those versions, and for now I'm just sticking to 16.54.  

I tried this in another game (DoDonPachi) and initally could not reproduce it, but then I started mashing buttons as if I were playing defender (primarily left-ctl and left-alt) and I was immediately thrown back to GameEx (with the game still running in the background).  Playing the game normally doesn't do this.  Once again, going back to 16.54 eliminates the problem.

Note that in looking at the forum there is an issue posted here, that looks exactly like the problem I'm having, so I'm keeping a watchful eye on any solutions to that one. 

Dave

 

[tthurman]

My hunch would be that the key mappings on  your controller are triggering some event or there is a input device conflict of some sort, but Tom will need to see your GameEx ini and log to attempt to determine anything.

 

[Draco1962]

To add on to what @tthurman said, we are at v16.74 so please upgrade to the latest and attach tbe gameex.ini and log.txt files frim when the error occurred in that version. Thanks.

[Gildahl]

I  believe I found the culprit.  There was a line in the [internal] section of GameEx.ini that had changed from mameversion=0.145 to 0.222 even though Defender is running under MAME 0.222.   Changing it back to 0.145 fixes the problem.   I do use a launch script; however, that allows me to launch games under any version of MAME I like, so perhaps that has something to do with it (though I've been doing that for years); but anyway, it does seem fixed now.  Will just need to keep an eye to see that this setting doesn't change in the future I guess.

[Draco1962]

Glad you were able to sort it out. Stay warm and get a kid to shovel the drive and sidewalk!