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ID Category [?] Severity [?] Reproducibility Date Submitted Last Update
08558 Color/Palette Minor Always Feb 12, 2023, 00:18 Feb 12, 2023, 12:00
Tester mamefan View Status Public Platform MAME (Official Binary)
Assigned To Resolution Open OS Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
Status [?] Confirmed Driver
Version 0.251 Fixed in Version Build 64-bit
Fixed in Git Commit Github Pull Request #
Summary 08558: vandyke: black bar near top during gameplay, after exit of setup menu.
Description A horizontal black bar displays near the top. 0.250 does not have this issue for me.
Steps To Reproduce
Additional Information
Github Commit
Flags
Regression Version
Affected Sets / Systems vandyke
Attached Files
png file icon 0000.png (1,607,299 bytes) Feb 12, 2023, 00:18 Uploaded by mamefan
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Notes
4
User avatar
No.21069
jkburks
Tester
Feb 12, 2023, 08:06
In older versions of MAME that black bar appears during power-on-self-test, but does not appear during gameplay.

In 0.251, with hlsl enabled, the game boots directly into the service menu, and after exiting the menu the black bar appears during gameplay.

Setting hlsl_enable to 0 brings it back to the way it was before.
User avatar
No.21070
Robbbert
Senior Tester
Feb 12, 2023, 11:08
Are you saying that the use of HLSL alters the execution of the game? That doesn't make sense.

Tested with current git, all is fine, with and without HLSL.
User avatar
No.21071
Robbbert
Senior Tester
Feb 12, 2023, 11:48
I did some more testing, and there is something weird going on, but I don't think it's anything to do with HLSL.

At the start where the dragon is breathing fire I pressed F2 and the game froze, so I quit and started again. It went straight to the setup screen, on exit of this the black line appeared, however it didn't stay black, but flashed various colours for a while. Eventually it did settle down to black.

So it appears to be something caused by being in the F2 setup menu.

The fact that pressing F2 freezes the emulation is a concern too.

I assume that pressing F2 should swap the screen to the menu, and pressing it again should switch back - but that switching isn't happening.
User avatar
No.21072
jkburks
Tester
Feb 12, 2023, 12:00
I'm just relaying the results of my own brief testing of the game.
I see now after reading your comment that there must be another variable in play.

I launched vandyke in the official MAME 0.251 (my normal mame install folder, which is full of cruft) and it booted directly into the service menu, which is a bit odd. When I exited the menu and played the game, it exhibits the black bar on the screen during play as described in this report.

So I made a clean install of MAME 0.251 in a different folder and copied the 2 required zip files into the roms folder and tried again with no mame.ini file.
vandyke launched as it normally does, and did not exhibit the black bar during gameplay, which would indicate to me that it is not a MAME bug, but rather some conflict in the files that have built up in my install folder.

I checked to see if there were any cfg or nvram or hiscore files associated with vandyke in my regular mame install, since those can cause issues between versions. I renamed or deleted any I found, and tried again. Vandkye still booted to the service menu and exhibited the black bar during play.

So next I renamed the mame.ini in my regular mame install folder and launched vandyke again.
And it ran as usual without the black bar, which would indicate to me that there was some line-item in the ini triggering the problem.

I didn't want to spend a long time with this since any solution is above my pay grade, but noticed that the only line that seemed to trigger the issue was enabling hlsl. To be clear:

When I launch vandkye in my regular (messy) mame install (updated to 0.251), with a mame.ini that I have had for ages, with hlsl set to 1, the game boots to the service menu and exhibits the black bar during gameplay.
When I edit the mame.ini to set hlsl to 0, the game boots as it normally does and does not exhibit the black bar during gameplay.

After reading your post I realized I never tried to enable hlsl in the clean install folder and launch the game.
When I do that the game boots as usual, so there is more to the problem than just the hlsl setting, and I am not sure what it is.