Yeah, sorry, it’s almost like you read my mind, it did appear to be font related funny enough for some reason as never realised it needed a separate click on an additional file & partly figured it out after posting and realising part of the problem was down to renaming the default install folder which I did last night just before head down as unpacking took forever lol.  But just checking it works as at least 1 game, Wacky Races doesn’t for some reason.

Thanks for the reply, will look at that in a bit as currently seeding for a while to ensure I give back.

Hardware wise, not sure if it’s an issue but maybe as I’m not using high specs, just a 4th gen i3, 8gb ram & just the built in graphics running win 10 which seems to play at least up to Dreamcast fine for which I have no desire to play anything more recent system wise.  But as the hardware is in a SFF case I can’t really upgrade to a dedicated graphics card. Well I looked into a dedicated 1 for it, but as it’s an SFF case and more an office based system then the PSU doesn’t really have much spare power to run the very few dedicated GP that are compatible with SFF cases.  

Wacky Races, the error there appears to be internal game related as it says “ERROR 0004-FFFFFF9C I/O ERROR”

So I installed the Visual C Runtimes a short while ago.  And whilst I no longer get the error message I posted above I do now get another problem.  And that’s whilst it looks to get further, I now get as far as the bezel loading, a black game screen then the entire screen goes black for a few seconds before resetting to the game selection screen.  Not to sure it will directly be hardware related over some system file it expects to find, but nothing shows on the screen to give a pointer as to a possible cause for this.

Im going to have another look tomorrow at the other Taito Type X games to see if they work to see if any clues come up, but I’m stumped at the moment.

Hi & thanks for the reply, to update I’ve now tried all the Taito Type X titles with mixed results.

4 titles seem to work or at least load without issue and allow play, these are:

Trouble Witches

Contra Evolution

Super Street Fighter IV

The King Of Fighters XIII

The 3 that don’t as my first post:

Wacky Races (already detailed)

Chase HQ 2

Spica Adventure 

Chase HQ 2: reports the error: “There was an error waiting for the window “PJ_CHASE ahk_class RwAppClass” to become active.  Please check you have the correct version emulator installed for this module, followed any notes in the module, and have this emulator working outside your Frontend first.  Also turn off fade to see if you are hiding the problem”

Fade was turned off and the same error above reported.  Though I’m seemingly unable to work out how to run this title outside of the front end as the “game.exe” files doesn’t seem to want to load
un.

Spica Adventure:  Prettu much the same as chase HQ only it states “waiting for window “SpikaADV. ahk_class Spika

ADV.”.  Trying to load the game outside of the frontend kind of starts.  I get the window with the games “game loading” on the bottom right flashing twice before it locks up and the window remains blank.

I don’t know if any of that means anything or helps.  But in the first instance I have a very similar spec second machine I intend to test tomorrow to see if there is any difference.  That’s pretty much the exact same spec just in a full desktop case instead of this SFF case.  If the error is the same I’d feel it’s maybe down the the 4th Gen i3 built in graphics?.

Thanks for the reply, yes using Win 10 64 bit, is this a likely cause?.

I never even thought to check that I had DirectPlay, had no reason to before now lol.  But no, Wacky Racers never asked to install DirectPlay. However, after them installing it (appears I never had it installed before) Spica now runs fine without issue.  So that now only leaves Wacky Races & Chase HQ 2.

A big update on the issue of the 2 games, Wacky Races & Chase HQ 2.  As said, I tried to play via 2 separate systems of pretty much the exact same hardware (i3 gen 4 on board graphics, 8gb ram win 10 64bit).  I assumed the issue maybe down to the on board graphics.  But looking at the age\history of the games and the info Enkak posted about them basically being arcade pc systems running on older windows os & direct x etc.  Well it kind of got me thinking that from a hardware point of view, due to the age of the games that this old 4th gen i3 should be capable of running the games as despite the computers age, its still more recent & powerful that the original pc based hardware they ran on.  And as all the other Taito Type X titles loaded without issue that there was a fair chance that the onboard graphics itself might not be the problem.  So I started to think of the cause from an arcade cabinet point of view seeing as they were pc based to start with and that’s when the idea came to me.

To try & cut a long story shorter, if a cabinet developed a loading issue you’d check everything in the cabinet, in this case the pc which I already knew worked and had all the required dependency files as in the read me etc.  So the controls, I’m using a USB mouse & keyboard and everything else about the frontend works fine yet everything about playing the games is directed at (mainly xbox 360) controllers which I never gave a second thought as I’m in the process of building a bar top arcade cabinet to house everything.  But wait, everything about playing the games is still aimed at game controllers (which I guess can be mapped to the arcade cabinets control panel eventually when built).  So I dug out an old logitech controller to try some of the other console systems anyway. But decided to try the 2 problem titles just as a thought of the above, and guess what, after the antivirus warning screens of sorts both now load and play flawlessly.

So the problem was that there was no game controller connected despite that there was still 2 other USB devices (mouse & keyboard)  that otherwise seemed to work to use Attraction without issue.  So problem solved & I’m made up with it now.

Reading back some of the read me files etc, I’ve not noticed anything to say that a game controller needs to be connected to get some games to load and nothing about the problems I had the last 2 days with Wacky Races & Chase HQ 2 gave any indication to this being the eventual cause either.

So whilst this might have been oh so obvious to many on here, it wasn’t to me even if it if a basic requirement to run Attraction because as said it worked fine with the keyboard.  So maybe something can be added as a note in future releases to state that some systems may have issues loading & playing unless an actual controller is connected.