[ATTN TOM] v18.84 Unhandled Exception has occured in your application

[Tom Speirs]

PS: It appears to be an issue after exiting attract mode. Does that sound right?

Is attract mode working and launching mame games?

[Tom Speirs]

Please try 18.85. Available in 10 minutes.

[Apothecon]

I truly appreciate your support.  The changes that we have made have improved the stability 90%.  In my further testing I have discovered something I wanted to share as it might help you with issues like mine in the future. I think the few instances I am seeing now could be related to specific ROMs.  The program rotates thru random games in attract mode, and if it doesn't land on one of the problem ROMs in this random rotation it wont crash.  If it does land on one of the problem ROMs it will crash.  When it crashes its stuck on the screen showing the game in question, and I have seen it stuck on the same game multiple times. P47 Phantom Fighter will cause the crash every time the program lands on it during attract mode. My ROMs have been collected and added to for years, maybe I have some old ROMs that are not compatible any more?  I hope this information may shed some more light on this issue for future troubleshooting. 

Thank you  

[Apothecon]

I tried 18.85 and it crashed in about 5 minutes.  Log file is attached. 

 

log.txt

[Draco1962]

1 hour ago, Apothecon said:

My ROMs have been collected and added to for years, maybe I have some old ROMs that are not compatible any more?

It is essential that your ROM versions match your version of MAME. If you have been upgrading MAME and just adding new ROMS here and there, it is very possible that incompatiblity has crept in.

Per the log you are currently using MAME 0.207. The current version of MAME is 0.271. 

Most times an older version ROM will work with no issues, but then won't in a latter version as new parameters are discovered and implemented. The following response to a question about forward compatibility illustrates this better:

https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,106212.msg1125776.html?PHPSESSID=0abgq5d3ci117rqks9qpmdvndp#msg1125776

[Tom Speirs]

My best diagnose on this issue is that MAME is crashing, not GameEx. The issue is because MAME is still open in a crashed state it is causing GameEx to crash.

[Apothecon]

Could you guide me thru replacing my MAME with the newest version and just then maybe copy all my ROMs to a "old" folder and start again and see if it still occurs? 

 

[Tom Speirs]

Sorry, I am not sure we can help with that here. Please see Draco's post above.