Home Page Forums Archives MacMAME AAAAH! HELP! PLEASE!!!!

Okay, so I've got a party coming up tomorrow, and I thought it would be a good idea to set up an account that only allowed for MacMAME, case anyone thought it might be fun to dig through all my stuff when I wasn't looking.

Of course, since all relevant information is stored in the Documents folder, this required doing quite a bit of moving things around and creating a lot of aliases.

And now, MacMAME is broken, on all accounts.

The frontend loads, but when I select a game, I get a white screen where the game should be, and the application freezes. I did make sure to set my folder permissions right, and I'm at a loss.

Only thing I did manage to do was on the party guest account, I deleted all the folders, created a ROMs folder, and put mrdo.zip in it. Now, on the party guest account, I can play Mr. Do! in 87b, but not in 94 or 95. And the same trick doesn't work on my account.

Please help.

Obvious hint: repair permissions with Disk Utility....sorry, don't have any brilliant ideas

Alright, well, did that (bit of a process there), but still nothing got fixed. The .87b seems to be mostly okay - I've added a couple other ROMs, and they work fine, but the problem is still there.

On my account, I loaded up a ROM, waited a couple minutes, and DID manage to get it to a point where it said "Type 'OK' to continue", but typing OK didn't do anything. Also downloaded a fresh copy of 95u1 to see if that would help, but it didn't.

I'm well beyond my scope of knowledge. I was content with the idea that if I screwed anything up, I could fix it, but that's proven to be untrue as well.

.87b, on the secondary "new" account, is working for the time being - but I really wish I knew what was causing the problem - and, more importantly - how I could fix it.

It would probably be good to know exactly what you did.

Here is what I did when I upgraded from .74u2 to .94u1 which worked just fine (note that I like to have all games in /Applications/Games and all actions are taking place in the gui unless stated otherwise):

1. Create /Applications/Games/MacMAME and copy compiled .94+ binary into it.
2. Copy everything bar the binary from my old MacMAME folder into /Applications/Games/MacMAME
3. Create ~Documents/MacMAME
4. Create aliases in /Applications/Games/MacMAME for the following and copy those aliases into ~Documents/MacMAME (this actually simplifies what was a trial-and-error process of multiple restarts as I couldn't remember what needs aliasing and what doesn't):
Artwork
Cabinet Art
Cabinet Marquees
Categories
Control Panels
Game Flyers
High Scores (formerly Scores)
Misc Support Files
NVRAM
ROMs
Screenshots
Sound Samples
Title Screenshots

Note that Config will be on a per-user basis and you shouldn't be re-using config files from pre-.94u1 versions of MacMAME.

Everything worked peachy keen after that. If your basic install is breaking that would seem to imply you're moving things out of your actual MacMAME.app folder and putting them elsewhere; as long as it's one of the folders indicated above that should work, however, I think you will find things easier if you go with what I've outlined above for future maintenance of your installation.

Interesting...

Okay, so I created another account, sort of second trial of what I did eariler, in an effort to - if not fix the problem, at least make a workable MacMAME machine for tomorrow's shindig.

So I created another account, in the same way that I did last time, except originally - aliases were pulling from an updated permissions version of the documents folder. This time around, aliases are pulling from a publicly available subdirectory in the applications folder that everyone is pulling from.

Okay, so - it worked on the new account. Which is weird. Weirder still: It's working on the main account - even though it's set up exactly as it was before, but now with two people using the same folders instead of one.

I guess the important thing is (and things are subject to change, but) it's fixed. I have no goddamn clue what I did to fix it, and if anyone down the way encounters the same problem, I would have not a shred of advice, but in all three accounts - the problem is now fixed.

So, uh... that's weird, huh?

It could well be permissions. It isn't documented (to my knowledge) what kind of access, if any, MacMAME looks for when it's running.

I should think that read-only would work but for three directories:

NVRAM
High Scores
Config

Every user's Config directory will get created by MacMAME when they run a game, so that shouldn't be an issue and they should have read-write access to it -- unless you created the ~Documents/MacMAME folder as a different account, in which case they may not, which would be a problem.

The NVRAM and High Scores folders in the main application directory would need to be read-write for everyone if they're being shared via aliases; otherwise see above.

If anyone knows more about the way things work behind the scenes fill in the blanks, but I should think that something went wrong in the initial creation of the account or there was a permissions issue that may have been fixed inadvertantly by what you just did.

This situation (multiple users sharing NVRAM etc) is something that needs documentation in the next official release.

Yeah, it re-broke. Check this.

So, through my confusion mentioned above, I did manage to "fix" the problem, and I was content. Elated, even. It worked yesterday morning, it worked yesterday evening. I brought the computer downstairs, planning on it being the centerpiece of the soiree, hooked everything up, and loaded up MacMAME.

It was like two hours before guests were supposed to arrive, so I played some Alien Vs. Predator to while the time away. Then, having more things to do, I shut down the computer and set out snacks.

Rebooted the computer, and it was broken from then on. I can say that fortunately there was booze and PS2 to keep people occupied, and nobody seemed to care that MacMAME wasn't working except me.

What I can't figure is, these three things don't work.

1. Going into the documents folder, trashing all the folders, and creating a ROMs folder with a single ROM in there. It would seem to me that if the problem was in the permissions, that would fix it.

2. Changing renderer to "Software" - just in case the problem was with OpenGL.

3. Re-downloading 95u1 - in case the application itself got b0rked.

So I'm thinking there's gotta be a preferences file or something that I haven't got to yet. Other than what's stored in the Documents folder - does MacMAME read or write to any other files I should be looking at?

At a minimum you should have the following:

/Applications/MacMAME containing MacMAME.app
~Documents/MacMAME/ROMs containing zipped ROMs (or an alias to a folder with zipped ROMs in it)

Via Info the user should have Read permission for /Applications/MacMAME/MacMAME and Read&Write permission for ~Documents/MacMAME/

I cannot see why this would fail if the above were not true.

I suppose for further troubleshooting rather than an explanation, an actual listing of your /Applications/MacMAME and ~Documents/MacMAME folder would be useful as well as a current state of play with regards to what happens when you try to launch -- also, what ROM are you using in your test?

With regard to what else MacMAME writes to it still uses ~Library/Preferences/MacMAME Prefs, but given that this should be created after launching the app, I don't think that would be the problem.

Check. Check. Check.

Yup. Welcome to my world.

I've abandoned the account I made, now untimely as well as ineffective, but the standard account remains as badly off as ever.

In the Applications/MacMAME folder, I've got 87b, 94u1, and 95u1, as well as a folder marked "public folders", which the alias was pulling from...

Okay, note on this: As I said, I trashed all the aliases, but the folders they used to pull from was still in a subdirectory under Applications/MacMAME. So I took all those folders, copied 'em into Documents/MacMAME, and now 87b is running again. 94u1 and 95u1 however, are still screwing up.

Now, wait again!!! So I had 87b up, and did the "configure joysticks" thing in the frontend, forgetting temporarily that 87b doesn't have joystick support.

Okay, so this is after opening up 94u1 and 95u1, several times, and the only thing I did was "configure joysticks" in 87b.

Now, all three are running like a charm.

The only thing worse than something breaking for no good reason is something working for no good reason. Just like before, I can replicate neither the problem nor the solution, and I don't hold much stock in the idea that this same thing won't happen again.