Why do MAME games in LaunchBox always use the computer's speakers to play sound?

[none2003]

Recently, I just acquired MAME 0.278 ROMs (split) and successfully imported them into LaunchBox 13.22.

I tried running some games, and overall they work fine, but the downside is that all these games use the computer's speaker to play sound without exception, even when I plug in headphones and have set the headphones as the default audio output device in Windows (for example, when watching YouTube videos, the sound comes out of the headphones).

I downloaded MAME alone and then ran the game directly with it, in this case, the game sound will play from the headphones.

Is there a way to make MAME in LaunchBox adhere to Windows' default audio output device settings? I don't want to wake up my family while playing games at midnight.

BTW, I'm using Windows 11 24h2.

Thanks in advance.

 

Edited July 4 by none2003

[JoeViking245]

There is a known issue with the audio output in MAME's 0.278 release.

More discussion about this can be found here: 

 

 

2 hours ago, none2003 said:

I downloaded MAME alone and then ran the game directly with it, in this case, the game sound will play from the headphones.

Is there a way to make MAME in LaunchBox adhere to Windows' default audio output device settings?

To clarify, you have 2 copies of stand-alone MAME on your PC? 

• One you downloaded (let's say it's in D:\Temp\MAME\mame.exe),
• and [guessing] one LaunchBox installed for you (let's say it's in D:\LaunchBox\Emulators\MAME 0.278\mame.exe). 

And both are MAME release 0.278?  Be sure the one in "Temp" is also 0.278.

And when using the on in "Temp" directly, there are no issues?  But when using the one in "Emulators" via LaunchBox, there are sound issues?

Is this all correct (except for, of course, possible the actual folder locations)?

[none2003]

@JoeViking245

I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding. I did not verify the version of MAME I earlier downloaded when posting, because it was not downloaded from the official GitHub (we usually have restricted access to GitHub here). Just checked, it's a very old version, 0.210.

So I managed to download 0.278 from the MAME GitHub repository, then ran it, and indeed there was no sound (it's strange why the version downloaded by LaunchBox has sound, and it also always outputs to the speaker).

For comparison, I downloaded 0.277, and this version runs with correct sound output. I plan to temporarily configure this version in LaunchBox as the MAME runtime environment.

Thank you for bringing the post about the audio issue in version 0.278 to my attention, which gave me the idea to solve the problem.