MAMEWorld Forums - Hardware - Re: Windows xp mame black screen.

> EDIT: Fixed! Had to change the video setting from d3d to ddraw thanks again to
> Tafoid!
>
> Hi I'm trying to setup mame and keep running into one problem, no mater how I launch
> mame, through a front end or not, I just get a black screen. No games launch and will
> sit on a black screen forever if you'd let it.
>
> My roms are version .151 so I'm using that. I have a dell dimension 3000 with a
> Pentium 4 cpu at 2.80 ghz. 512 MB of ram.Using on board graphics.

What type of integrated graphics? The i810 (and possibly the 845 as well) are well known to fail at just about everything on the planet in D3D unless they are forced to use 16-bit color (welcome to 1994). Intel 865 works fine with MAME.

My Sempron 140 system has an nForce 630a chipset and runs XP SP3. This works fine with 2009-era drivers (the version I'm using is 6.14.11.8634), but if Windows Update forces the latest Nvidia drivers during an update, or if I manually download them from Nvidia themselves, running MAME causes nothing but a BSOD and results in me rolling back to the 2009 drivers again (and disabling the auto-update for good).

I would suggest adding another 512MB to the machine, although MAME should still be fine with 512MB on XP (it isn't Vista at least, although even a 512MB Vista machine can run MAME fine, unless Windows Update kicks in and takes over the PC, thrashing the hard drive for three hours).

Lastly, my main MAME/emulation system is in fact a 2.8GHz Celeron with 1GB DDR, still running the same install of XP it had 9 years ago! Naturally, it does not run anything beyond the SNES (aside from pSX on the rare occasion) due to the speed, so more recent games are pushed to the newer machines, although I rarely play them via emulation due to them being either too preliminary or simply too slow (particularly the case with PS2 emulation). As for MAME, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 or Point Blank 1 is roughly the Celeron's upper limit before things start dropping under 100% speed. Note that a Pentium 4 will have a few more games it can play at full speed compared to my ancient Celeron, maybe even full speed in Mario Kart on Project64 (it lags at random for me, usually when the CPU activates a star, although it could also be video card related, as PJ64 annoyingly doesn't have a pSX-style non-enhanced "fast" mode).