dlf

BTW, I had remembered incorrectly. The issue didn't go away until I updated all the Dell drivers (using the Dell update), which included the firmware.

Typically very early during my first mame gameplay session. It only happens once. It may also be system related as I usually play right after boot. Since Windows isn't actually done with startup when you can first use the system, who knows...

Thanks everyone. I went into windows and disabled a ton of services launched on startup and the problem went away. So one of those was causing the issue. I still get a weird performance stutter sometimes, but I'm not losing focus now. Blame windows.

My box is stock windows 7 pro (64bit). Dell optiplex 9020M. No add ons, no additional software installed (beyond chrome), no separate video card.

I put together a new windows machine with Big Box for MAME. While playing a game, big box will sometimes grab focus (as if it thinks mame has exited) and thus mame goes to the background. If I use big box to select a new game, it launches *another* mame instance. If you win-tab you can get back to the first mame instance. It's bizarre. I think I've only seen this happen once per launch, and usually within the first few minutes of playing. I'm wondering if it's something on the system that is causing a hiccup, but I've no idea what would cause big box to think that the mame process has died. I've seen this both before and after I configured the machine to run bigbox on startup; before and after I set big box as the system shell; before and after I set bigbox to "hide the taskbar". If anyone has any ideas I'd be grateful! I'm all out of them.