03049: MAME degrades the stability of the operating system

ID	Category [?]	Severity [?]	Reproducibility	Date Submitted	Last Update
03049	Crash/Freeze	Minor	Always	Mar 22, 2009, 15:34	Mar 22, 2009, 22:58

Tester	AndersH	View Status	Public	Platform	MAME (Official Binary)
Assigned To		Resolution	Unable to reproduce	OS	Windows 98/Me
Status [?]	Closed			Driver
Version	0.130	Fixed in Version		Build
		Fixed in Git Commit		Github Pull Request #

Summary	03049: MAME degrades the stability of the operating system
Description	One or a small number of runs is usually OK, but experimenting (restarting MAME) with different games and different settings, invariably windows will crash sooner or later, typically complaining about extremely low levels of system resources. This is basically because MSwin sucks (even in later versions), but I suspect the operating system is being provoked by some problems with resource handling in MAME. It could also be that my HW/drivers are unstable, although I feel I generally have less problems with other gaming/emulation software. Note: This is probably not better or worse than MAME 0.62.
Steps To Reproduce	Restart MAME with a game emulation some 10-20 times. Window or fullscreen does not seem to matter much.
Additional Information	(I set "Reproducibility" to "always" because it is only a question of when, not if. Already after running MAME once with graphics, the "shutdown Windows" procedure will always freeze on my computer. Sometimes the system complains about the process "MAMEoutput" not responding - and it will not be killed.) Anders Hallström's old system: PIII 1GHz, 384MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 32MB, Win 98 SE(!), with numerous patches from MS Windows Update (I know this is officially a bad test platform. I apologize, but it is not practical for me to try it with a more recent Windows version right now.)
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No.04024 Tafoid Administrator Mar 22, 2009, 18:28	Ok... You are right about Windows 98 being an undesired test platform. At it's best, it's not too stable and a large portion of your issue might be OS related rather than MAME related. First off, I've set you to VIEWER right now until I can take some time to sort out your 'reports'. Many of which seem like feature requests or other wishes for documentation. It might have been a wiser move to discuss these problems somewhere first before putting them on MANTIS, especially not all these at once. If, after we get a chance to sort out your submissions and they seem to be actual bugs can be duplicated on a modern OS... then we will allow you to make reports again. I hope to be back in a few hours to handle these. Devs, if you want to try to address them in mean time - please do.
No.04025 Haze Senior Tester Mar 22, 2009, 20:18 edited on: Mar 22, 2009, 20:25	as stated, a lot of these seem to be a) WIndows 98 issues (I don't see any of the Instability, Zombie windows, D3D breaking etc. on XP/Vista) or b) Feature requests. For the former, anybody still running Windows 98 deserves all they get, and I really think Aaron should official End of Line support for it in MAME by going full Unicode, it's simply not a viable platform for usability, stability, or security. The rest of them are also rather subjective. I don't think Mantis is really the place for them. An official mantis discussion board hosted here would probably help for discussing such things before posting them, as these aren't really 'bugs'.
No.04032 Tafoid Administrator Mar 22, 2009, 22:57	MAME in my experience is no worse for your system than any other application can be. I was not able to get any instability running "mame -nothrottle mrdo" about 25 times in a row.. so I would think this is more of a Win98SE stability and not MAME's fault in particular.