Does AM crash while generating its game list for anyone else?

[robertofresca]

I pointed AM to the latest MAME, and it crashes at around 20% every time. This is the latest version.

[bionictoothpick]

If you are able to try from the command line...that might work.

[hermine.potter]

@robertofresca
which version of mame (current 0.170)?

[butanebob]

I pointed AM to the latest MAME, and it crashes at around 20% every time. This is the latest version.

Yep, it gets to about 2% for me and then crashes to desktop. My mame is slightly older though, i think it's groovymame .164.

[robertofresca]

Isn't this a really horrible and obvious problem that should be fixed? It doesn't leave a very good first impression.

[omegaman]

AM should work fine with the latest MAME or any other version for that matter. So, before we start blaming AM, lets get some more information first. Like, what OS version of AM are you using, and is it 32b or 64b? Also, posting a config file would help rule out configuration issues. Though, config issues for the most part  shouldn't cause AM to crash.

Here are some basic troubleshooting tips:

Run AM from the cmd line, any config issues will generate error dialog.
If you are having a problem with 64b AM, try the 32b ver. 
Make sure you have the emulator configured before importing romlist.
Worst case senario, delete configs and run AM again.

[raygun]

Isn't this a really horrible and obvious problem that should be fixed? It doesn't leave a very good first impression.

I agree this is bad and needs to be fixed.  Please describe as much as you can what is happening so I can try to reproduce it here.

Also, there have been some recent changes to the scraping/list generation, could you try the development version of attract-mode and let me know if that still crashed for you as well: https://build.zaplabs.com/project/attractmode/

[necrosis]

This might sound strange, but i did get a crash recently when generating a mame list, but it only occurred after I was missing around with displays. Normally i just used cools but I was playing with a different one (not even the mame display!) and it  crashed two times in a row during rom list generation, then i reverted back to cools and it worked again.

This is probably just a red herring but thought I would mention it, i dismissed it myself as being a random event given one thing shouldn't really affect the other.

[omegaman]

A good test would be to import a romlist as opposed to generating one. If AM doesn't crash then it's a safe bet that the rom generation is broken now.  Never had AM crash on me that I can remember.

[robertofresca]

It doesn't crash for me when generating the list from the command line only when using the UI.

Here's what I see:

Starting Attract-Mode 1.6.2 (Windows)
Config: D:\amfe\attract.cfg
*** Generating Collection/Rom List
 - Found 32883 files.
 - Obtaining -listxml info... 11%terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range'
 what():  basic_string:substr: __pos (which is 16842800) > this->size() (which is 103)

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Hangs every time, but it doesn't hang at the same completion rate every time. Sometimes it gets to 20%, and sometimes it crashes as low as 11%.

[omegaman]

Interesting... Do you want to try importing this mame.xml file for a test. Drop this xml in your layout folder root then at the cmd line and run attract - i mame mame.xml. Assuming you have an emulator named mame. 

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[robertofresca]

Why would I do that? I'm already using the XML generated by the official MAME 0.170.

[cools]

I am 99% sure this is down to not having enough free RAM to deal with the number of ROMs found. I know if I have something taking up a big chunk of RAM in the background it will either crash or silently fail, and seems the frontend itself takes up enough RAM when running to cause it.

I've not been able to generate a new list for a few months.

--full doesn't seem to work from commandline either.

If I use a small directory of files it works without a hitch.

[robertofresca]

It works from the command line every time, so something about the UI process versus the CLI process must be different.

I've got 16GB of RAM, and AM is 64bit. It's not using up anywhere near enough to run out of memory.

[brywalker]

Had the same issue with like .164 maybe? Did it in compatibility mode and it finished properly and then ran it normal after they. No issues.