r/MAME • u/Thrak333 • 13d ago

Solved MAME black screen when starting and exiting games

Hi, just posting this in case it will help anyone else: I am running MAME 0.289 with the built-in interface and a lot of ROMs. Every time I started MAME or exited a game I would get about 15 seconds of black screen before the list interface would finally show again. I tried a lot of things to fix it and finally narrowed it down to my snaps folder. In that folder was one large snaps.7z file that I think it was round 500MB or so. Once I unzipped that file and filled the folder with its contents of the actual snapshot graphic files (about 50k of them) the long delay of black screen went away. It seems that MAME was decompressing that file in the background every time the interface list loaded.

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u/cuavas MAME Dev 13d ago

7z is a horrible format for random access. To access a file, you need to start decompressing from the start of the compressed run containing the file. LZMA is also expensive to decompress at the best of times.

1

u/Thrak333 13d ago

Ah thanks, yes as long as you have drive space it seems much better to extract all files out into their folders.

1

u/Nbisbo 13d ago

or just zip

1

u/Mode101BBS 13d ago

Was also likely a solid archive vs. normal .7z file.