jms93a
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2019 9:40 pm

Newer MAME versions lag to load in Windows 10

Hello all,

New to the forum, and getting back into emulation after a long hiatus. I apologize in advance if this is the wrong forum for troubleshooting my issue, if so, please direct me where I should go...

Anyway, my previous experience with MAME dates back to 2006 or 2007, so I'm sure I've missed quite a lot. I have recently attempted to install MAME on a newly built gaming computer, using the latest version of MAME (.206). Everything works with my old romset, but loads very slowly. Upon running the .exe there's ~30 second black screen before the UI loads. Upon selection of a rom to play, it can hang on a black screen for 1-2 minutes before it loads. To try to troubleshoot this, I went and downloaded some legacy versions of MAME to see if they had a similar issue... I was by no means exhaustive but interestingly the earliest 64-bit version works beautifully, other than having a less than desirable interface, the interface and rom I was trying (puyo) both load in well under one second. Any ideas what I'm missing here? Any help is appreciated!

Thanks!
User avatar
Klez
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:38 am

Re: Newer MAME versions lag to load in Windows 10

Hi Jms,

Experiment with different video output modes. Launch MAME from the terminal "cmd" with these parameters to experiment:

-video bgfx
-video d3d
-video opengl
-video gdi (last resort! very limited in functionality)

When you find the option that gives you the best performance you can make this configuration the default in the config file "mame.ini" in the line 253. Like this:

Code: Select all

#
# OSD VIDEO OPTIONS
#
video                     opengl

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