Home Page Forums MAME MAME Booting issues with Macintosh IIfx under 0.273

I sometimes see "stack overflow" errors in the terminal when using the IIfx. Also, very rarely, I have seen a freeze up when launching the IIfx, i.e. I get the hour glass icon in Windows and them MAME crashes out, before I see the "Welcome to Macintosh". I have seen these behaviors going back to earlier versions of MAME as far as 0.268, but it has been difficult to get enough consistency to obtain a clear indication as to the underlying cause. I think I will need to test this on a different machine to rule out any issues with my own system, although as mentioned I have perfect results with all other emulated Mac models.

That sounds a lot like a problem with your system, like marginal RAM or it's overclocked a hair past stable. What kind of system are we talking about?

It's an i9 13900ks with all recommended 'Intel default' settings in the BIOS - no overclocking and the ASUS motherboard is fully patched to correct the reported bugs with the 13th and 14th generation processors. It is a fresh build from September last year and I have not noticed any instability across the board. RAM is Kingston I believe - Fury Beast DDR5.

I suspect Windows 11 at times .. I am still on 23H2 fully up to date for that release. Also, I use Bitdefender, but I have had zero instances of weird behavior from that with any other app, so I know it is usually suggested as the first culprit, but I am skeptical. I can try turning it off temporarily. I consider that an unlikely cause because of the normal behavior in all other configurations of MAME on my system, in addition to the Mac models.

The next time I catch a terminal error I will try to copy that text - perhaps there is a log somewhere but I am not sure where to look.

I will also use a RAM diagnostic app to check for problems there.

Your CPU might already be permanently damaged because of the high voltages it used to run at (until Intel released the BIOS updates). MAME is a worst case scenario for your CPU because it mostly runs single core.

You should check out Windows Event Viewer -> System, should have a bunch of Error levels logged.

Well, I did not assemble my PC until September last year, as I was awaiting a motherboard patch to protect the processor from this issue. ASUS released a patch in August and so my CPU was theoretically never exposed to the issue in the first place. Ironically, I purchased the 13900ks for its high performance when running a single core.

I do see a few "Hanging Events" for mame.exe, corresponding to when I had freeze ups. There are no "Application Errors" listed against it though.

I also ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and my RAM passed all the tests.

From now on I will start from the terminal rather than a launch script, so I can hopefully catch the full error output the next time I have a crash.

I can only remember 2 times of that kind of weirdness: I had this 2 solutions:

- backup your mame.ini and create a new one, just in case something is not supposed to be there. Or simply install mame in another folder (but use a new mame.ini nonetheless) and start fresh.

- Once I had issues because I had numscreens 2 but only one monitor connected to the pc and mame doesn't like that.

Hope it helps in some way.

You can pause any script so to catch Command Line output fyi.