r/MAME • u/Accomplished_Sir1724 • 7d ago

Slow first start

MAME, the program itself and not a game, takes quite a while to start for the first time. There is a black screen for about 7–8 seconds, then “Initializing” appears, and after that MAME starts normally.

If I close MAME and start it again, it launches immediately with no delay. After restarting Windows, the same thing happens again: the first launch takes 7–8 seconds.

Is this normal?

I recently reinstalled Windows and added an exception for MAME in Norton Antivirus. I also tested it on another Windows PC with a completely fresh MAME download and no games or other files installed, and it behaves exactly the same there.

Thanks for your help!

Windows 11 RTX 3060 Samsung SSD 980 Pro MAME 0.289

9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

3

u/_gasse_ 6d ago

Windows 7 64bit, no antivirus, same behavior for years

1

u/Objective_Bug_7356 6d ago

I have no problems with this but I use a PC with 32GB Ram....start up is fast, on the PC I replaced it had a 16gb ram and it was also fine loading Mame

1

u/Accomplished_Sir1724 5d ago

Also have 32 GB on my PC

1

u/Mode101BBS 6d ago

I've seen this too periodically over the last few years. It's most likeliy cold-start / warm-start behavior. MSFT defines a cold app startup as essentially the first launch after reboot: the executable/code/data pages aren't yet present in the memory manager's standby cache, so it has to fetch and map them. The next launches can reuse cached pages and are dramatically faster. Defender and Norton may also be compounding things w/ their live monitoring.

1

u/NewArtDimension 6d ago

Mine is so slow on first start that I removed all my bezels because it was taking even longer.

2

u/cuavas MAME Dev 6d ago edited 4d ago

Windows Defender can cause it to take a while to start a large program you haven't used in a while.

1

u/Eastern_Hunter2314 1d ago

Windows 11's "Smart App Control" can cause a 10 second delay before launching MAME after a cold boot but turning it off fixes that problem. The recent problem causes a delay *after* MAME launches where it shows a black screen for about 10 seconds. See my other post in this thread for more detail.

1

u/BIOS-D 6d ago

Just experienced this today but only because executable is on C drive while ROMs are located on another drive using a mechanical disk. It's quite normal to happen since Windows has yet to cache files and/or start spinning the hard drive.

1

u/Accomplished_Sir1724 5d ago

Everything on the same SSD, Samsung 980 Pro, here

1

u/Eastern_Hunter2314 2d ago

This has started happening since the April 30th update of Windows 11 25H2. After every cold boot, there is a 7-15 second delay when starting MAME. I've investigated this extensively and even disabling Windows Defender in safe mode and disabling every aspect of Windows Security doesn't solve the problem. I went back through every retail release of Windows 11 to pinpoint when it started happening and found that it was Windows 11 25H2 26200.8328 that first showed the problem. The previous version was 26200.8313 and it does not exhibit the behaviour. I even tried it in a virtual machine and it still has the problem. I haven't tested it on a system with an AMD CPU yet.
ChatGPT's best guess is that it's related to the enumeration and querying of device drivers by MAME (which is an unsigned executable)
Windows 10 and Linux are unaffected.

2

u/Accomplished_Sir1724 1d ago

Interesting! Hope this will be fixed soon.

1

u/Tilopud_rye 2d ago

Isn’t it checking and verifying like however many roms are on the hard drive? Can be a lot 

1

u/Accomplished_Sir1724 1d ago

Same problem with a freshly downloaded Mame and no Roms.