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Hello,
I did quite a bit of searching before posting this, so please don't hit me if this has been gone over 500 times already

I just installed mame32 .65. It plays some replays, but others require their own version (duh). My ROMs work fine in .65. I was using burger time, for example.

When I try to load ANY game in a non-.65 version of mame32, it crashes when just beginning or while verifying the ROM files. When I launch the program initially, it asks "Mame32 has detected outdated configuration data... Would you like to use the new configuration?" I've tried both yes and no.

I've tried mame3236.exe and mame3235tg3.exe with and without audio, in windows 2k.

Thanks for any help,
gft

That configuration data is referring to the preference file mame saves somewhere in the windows folder....so when you run a different version of mame, it sees that different version it may or may not properly understand so triggers that warning/error asking you what you want to do.

That's all. If you click no then mame ignores that old preference/configuration file and uses default values.

These are for settings like frameskip, audio, joystick, mouse enabled, etc. type options.

In summary if you always click "no" then mame should run fine..you just need to make sure you are setting up the same settings...so in mame32 that means going into the default options window and setting all the options there.

I haven't had that problem but when you are using multiple mame32 versions the windows registry might have something to do with it. Definitley say YES to initialize the registry when first starting up mame32 with a different version, but i don't think this specifically is causing the crashing. (for completeness i save .reg export files for each mame32 version i have, so i can introduce them into the registry with a click and don't have to go in and click on all those nasty buttons to get the settings back to where i want them for.)

The audio dlls may have something to do with this but it usually complains they are not their and don't crash right away... more info would be usefull. (and this isn't really a marp thing more of a mame thing, but i'd be interested to know why you're getting crashes.)

Yes, I was getting the errors regarding the audio dlls, but I downloaded those files. perhaps i ahve the wrong ones, just with the same filename?

file - file size in bytes
audiow32.dll - 69,632
midas11.dll - 160256

Now I'm deleting mame's registry entries (why don't they just use ini files?!) and cfg files...

double clicking on burger time (data set 1) causes mame32 to crash right when the "loading" progress bar shows up.

Switching back to .65 works fine.

Wierd!
gft

EDIT: I'm in win2k

it might be your zlib.dll too, that used to come with older mame32's. if you have winzip, extract the burger time rom and recompress it (sometimes you can make the zip file a little smaller if you use maximum compression) and see if that works.

Now I'm deleting mame's registry entries

I wouldn't really recommend going in the registry for anything really. It's never really necessary unless in extreme circumstances and I don't think it's necessary in this case. You could end up even worse than when you started.
When you say crash do you mean the game just doesnt work or does the actual application stop responding? I run Win2k as well and have multiple versions of mame and mame32 but I've never come across a problem like this. Strange

For my next test I put mame3236.exe in a brand new folder. I put a new roms folder in there, and put btime.zip in there.

I tried rezipping btime.zip using 7-zip, which didn't help. Then I tried extracting it to a folder but mame crashed while auditing all games.

Using the new zip and original zip, mame crashes right when the progress bar for loading the game shows up. i get the error, "Mame3236 has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will need to restart the program."

I've found the drwatson error log, but I have no idea how to read it.

Version .65 still runs fine...

-gft

Drwatson excerpt:
Application exception occurred:
App: (pid=364)
When: 2/19/2003 @ 09:16:48.515
Exception number: c0000005 (access violation)

yeah it goes with out saying don't edit the registry unless you know what you are doing, but it looks like he does. if mame crashes while auditing it really has to be a decompression problem you might be loading a very old or corrupt version of zlib (if i'm not mistaken the new mames have zlib statically linked so they don't use the dll) but any old version will use the zlib dll, get a new one from an old "full" distribution of mame32 copy it to your mame directory, do a search for all the zlib*.dll's on your system and delete them, reboot (or regclean) and try again.

OK Chad, that was it! Windows had zlib.dll version 1.1.4.0, but I had a copy of version 1.2.1.0 thanks to mozilla. So I moved the new one to winnt\system32. Now everything works just dandy!

Thanks a lot for the help!

-gft