Tutorial - Posting a New Bug

Written by Fujix, Tafoid. September 18, 2014

This page explains how to post a new bug on MAME Testers.


1) Before you post

Before you post a new bug, please check the following:

2) Opening bug submit form

Open the drop down list and select "New MAME bug" if you wish to submit a MAME bug, select "New MESS bug" for MESS-specific bug. If your bug report is common both in MAME and MESS field, please select "New MAME bug". A new bug submission form opens....

3) Filling out report items

Now fill out each item as applicable. Items with * are necessary fields.

4) Submitting

Click the "Submit Report" button and the report will be assigned a number and added to the bug list. Please confirm that your submission is correctly listed in the View & Search page. The initial state of bug report is always New. The paper clip icon means that the report has attached files. Congratulations! Your bug submission has been completed.

5) What's next?

Your report will be checked by other Testers, Developers and Moderators for validity, reproducibility and regression version if necessary. When the report is confirmed as a proper bug, Status will be changed to Confirmed and will wait for a Developer to claim or fix it.

If a Developer wishes to address the bug, he can assign himself to it. In this case, the status will become Assigned. Please remember that this is an optional status, so not all bugs are assigned to someone before they are fixed.

Some reports may need more proof and inspection to make a final determination. These bugs are set as Acknowledged.

When a Resolution is taken, the status will be changed to Resolved. This is a list of possible resolutions:

If the report is invalid (unreproducable, not a MAME bug etc.), the status will be Closed. You can't add comment to Closed bugs.

Recapitulating the status:
ValueDescription
NewComprehensive testing/validiation has not been done yet.
Direction NeededSituation is deadlocked. Requires official position of Dev Team to be handled.
AcknowledgedHas been processed and some testing has been done, but there has been no final determination made as to it's status.
ConfirmedAnother tester or moderator has determined the bug to be valid.
AssignedHas been assigned to a Developer who is willing to research/correct the bug.
ResolvedA Bug which has been either Fixed, Won't be fixed or is a BTANB.
ClosedBugs which have been Invalidated, Duplicated, Suspended or Unable to be reproduced.
Note: Some of them have different meaning in MAME Testers from the original Mantis system.

6) Editing own report

You can edit/fix/update your own report after you submit it. Click the "Edit Report" button in the bug view page to open the edit form.

7) Monitoring report

You can monitor a bug report to know updates. Please click the "Monitor Report" button in the bug view page to start monitoring it. When you are monitoring a bug report and the status of the bug is changed or someone adds a note, you should receive a notification e-mail. Click the same button to end monitoring. You can control what event you will receive an e-mail notification on the preference page. Follow Account SettingPreferences and check the check boxes you want to receive e-mails. If none of boxes are checked, you won't receive any notifications even if you are monitoring a bug.

8) Producing more useful crash reports...

sometimes people report crash bugs here and I'm unable to reproduce them myself.
If a game is crashing it would be useful for us if you did the following.
  1. Create a clean compile of Mame with symbols turned on in the Makefile
  2. Download / Install GDB to your mingw directory if it isn't already there (I think its in the big mingw package tho)
  3. go to your mame directory and at the command prompt type
    gdb mame
    then in gdb
    run gamename -window
    (window is important or you may not be able to get back to the debugger)
  4. play the game until it crashes, it should pause rather than exiting mame.
  5. look at the gdb window, there should be something sort of sigsev type message there
  6. type 'bt' to get a backtrace to see where it crashed
    copy the details from this window and post them ...
by following this procedure its easier for us to understand where something is crashing ... and if you're good at getting something to crash then theres more chance we'll be able to fix it (for example I wasn't able to get ssf2x to crash under gdb, and the one time it did it gave no meaningful output... so I'm unable to get any idea of where the bug is)

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