Thanks for posting your cfg file Bubbles - it helped me work out what was going wrong!(posted 9414 days ago)Let me explain what I did to make it work. First I looked through both cfgs (yours and mine) and noticed several differences like triplebuffering, translucency, beam, flicker, gamma, ym3812opl, samplebits and several others. Your cfg also has some cfg strings that I don't have at all. Anyway I tried tweaking them one at a time and trying them out with no success. After a few I just copied your entire cfg replacing mine and ran it. It worked perfectly...
Now I really wanted to know what the offending cfg difference was. It turned out it wasn't the mame.cfg that was at fault at all.
After trying your mame.cfg and getting the inp to work I restored my original cfg and ran it and was astonished to find that it worked too (previously it didn't). I double checked that I did have my original cfg - yep! I then figured that something in the alpham2.cfg or alpham2.nv or memcard.000 had to be stuffing things up. I ran the inp again with my mame.cfg and it failed which corroborated this theory. I deleted the 3 files and reran the inp and it worked.
Conclusion - the problem is with the 3 files above and not with mame.cfg at all. Deleting the 3 files prior to each playback works perfectly. Hope this works for others trying this inp. Let me know. Also if anyone can shed more technical light on what is actually happening I'd love to hear it.
Oh and thanks for the awesome inp - it was great. Like I said I've been waiting to see someone finish this game for years. I didn't actually know that it finished after the second time through. That second pass through the game is positively wicked. Well done!