This tip covers several emulators. If you’re having a problem with your emulator crashing, check the name of the folder/directory path it’s in. If it was programmed for an older OS, it may not be able to recognize certain characters in the pathname and can’t find it’s own components.
Example: I was trying to run older versions of Mame to run old Kaillera replays, but noticed it would never find my roms. Checking the rom path, my directory name was truncated. This directory was created from a hard drive restore, and the program that created it put semi-colons in the name ( C 2010-12-15 15;46;15 ). Mame couldn’t read it properly. I moved it to a simpler sub-directory (just “C”) and everything worked fine.
I ran into this problem again with Vice yesterday (despite being x64 optimized), so if you’re having crash/load problems with older emulators that no one else seems to be having, try making sure your pathname is simple.