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

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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.