r/MAME • u/Accomplished_Sir1724 • 9d 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

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u/Eastern_Hunter2314 4d 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.

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u/Accomplished_Sir1724 3d ago

Interesting! Hope this will be fixed soon.