Q:

Crash and Reboot When Running mame.exe (MAME Emulator)

I downloaded the latest version of the MAME Emulator (version 0.142 - mame0142b.exe) from the address below recently:
http://mamedev.org/release.html
Unfortunately, when I execute the mame.exe file from the command line it just crashes (screen goes black for a second, then PC reboots by itself - no error is shown). I've tried running it without any ROMs, but still got the same problem.
I have the latest drivers installed (275.33) for my NVIDIA GeForce 6100 nForce 405.  I am using Windows XP Home SP 3.
Could you please advise how to get the emulator to run without crashing?
Here is the error I received (after disabling automatic restart):
Technical Information:
STOP: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0xBD1B1642, 0xB1078658, 0x00000000)
nv4_disp.dll - Address BD1BD1642 base at BD012000, DateStamp 4dd7387f

A:

I recently had this problem too with MAMEUI32 and MAME.
The cause of the fault in my case was with MAME's DirectX9 video mode. MAMEUI32 (and I assume MAME) offers the following display modes:
GDI, DirectDraw, DirectX8, DirectX9.
Only DirectX9 (i believe the default mode) reset my computer. All others work. Personally, I preferred the DirectDraw setting. I use this along with the non-hardware stretch setting, as this - though blocky - is kinder to my eyes.
If you plan to download the latest MAMEUI however (.143), note it suffers from long load-times. There are discussions on-line to help circumvent this. However, I am sticking to my old .130 version which works well.

A:

A video driver bug is the most likely culprit. Try running mame in a window instead of fullscreen with the switch -window. You could also try -video gdi.

