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Big Box incorrectly thinks mame exited


dlf

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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.

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Are you using the default Mame Keybindings?   Those things are awful.  Having a keystrokes for alt and ctrl is just begging for some keyboard combo to get through to the OS and do a "windows shortcut thing".   I had quite a few issues with MAME losing focus and switching back to the Front-End--hyperspin at the time. Rebinding the player one buttons to alpha keys eliminated the problem for me.

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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.

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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...

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Yeah it might be a case of Windows still doing shit in the back ground.

I was thinking maybe if it was seemingly random through out gameplay in Mame that maybe turning the "sleep" option off. What that option does is it throttles the CPU when Mame doesn't need all the CPU power to play a game but when it hits a point in the game where it needs more power it ramps the CPU back up and this can cause stutter issues.

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