On the positive, I WAS able to get one behavior change in GroovyMiSTer after disabling the MiSTer firewall - now when I launch GroovyMame, the bouncing logo goes away as if it is ready to accept a signal, except nothing appeared. I just now thought you may have meant my OS firewall, and now got GroovyMAME working!! THANK YOU! It was a firewall issue -allowing GroovyMAME as a program exception on the OS side was the holdup.
I was waiting on trying MiSTerCast until I got GroovyMame/Mister working. Watched VGE's tutorial video and read the documentation.
Installed the VC_redist file, then loaded up MiSTerCast 1.0
Though I don't see a ping option, I presume you mean just enter the MiSTer IP and see if I can get things running. Already have an issue under logs:
Initializing MiSTerCast
DxgiOutput1->DuplicateOutput failed: -2005270524 Failed to initialize video capture
SetModeline called
Then, funny enough- I am unable to close MiSTerCast.exe at all... unless I hit 'Start Stream' and then the program crashes; here, I can close the crashed program. Changes to the dropdown Display 1 to other options also crash the program outright. Just for fun, I then saw the latest GroovyMister had a version 1.01 test version of MiSTerCast which repeats everything above exactly as ver 1.0.