Howdy. I was taking a break this afternoon and fired up MAME on one of the
systems in a computer lab that I support. I brought up a DOS prompt under
Win95 (booting to DOS is made deliberately difficult on these systems), typed
in the command line, and was shocked to see the machine completely lock up as
soon as the program started. Even C-A-D brought no response, and I had to
cycle the power to reboot. I got the same result on two identical machines
under two very different Win95 configurations.

Mighty strange. I’ve played MAME many times on all my wierd home systems and
on a couple machines around work, and have never had any serious problem
occur. And the other machines at work are also IBM PC3xx series units, with
similar hardware.

The systems are brand new IBM PC350′s: P200MMX, 32MB RAM, EIDE HD and CD-ROM,
S3 Trio V64+ chipset (2MB) on the MB, a 3Com 3C905TX ethernet card, and a
SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold. They’re both running Win95 OSR2 with Novell Client32
v2.12 and relevant drivers, but that’s where the similarity ends. I was
running MAME with the default parameters and with standard (not AWE 32) SB
audio selected. Running with no sound selected seemed to work at first, but
the system locked on the second attempt.

Right now my prime suspects are the AWE-64, and the VESA support on the S3
chipset.  I saw a thread a while back about crashes using a similar video
chipset, but no resolution to the problem. Any comments or suggestions are
welcome!

-Bryan

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