from Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world to retrogaming@lemmy.world on 08 Oct 05:27
https://lemmy.world/post/37047302
So, I recently got a Retroid Pocket Flip2, but I’ve had a rough go.
I’ve been setting it up for the past week. I’ve had one major problem this whole time.
I’d go into ES-DE, go into NES, go to a game, and boot it up. Aaaaaaand I’d get a black screen with no context. Game wouldn’t load. No error message. Nothing to tell me what I did wrong.
So I go into retroarch directly, and find it works just fine. Huh.
So off to google I go, and I got thrown for a loop, because apperently about 8 months ago there was an actual bug in the nightly releases that was patched a few days later. But that was 8 months ago in the nightly releases, and fixed, AND I only downloaded the stable version 1 week ago. But thats all google was finding.
The other thing I was finding was that this problem happens if you don’t have the proper BIOS files. The problem with that is, the NES doesn’t have BIOS files at all.
Finally I figured out theres a log file. And so I look at the log file, and it says Mensen.so was an invalid or missing file.
No clue what that means.
So as it turns out, ES-DE has preassigned default cores that it expects you to use for each system. Mensen is an NES core emulator, but I had downloaded FCE. And I only downloaded one NES emulator, because I figure it’s the NES. How hard can it possibly be to emulate a 40 year old system on modern hardware, right?
Well, that’s true. But ES-DE is specifically always looking for the default. In this case Mensen. When it didn’t find it, it gave up. Didn’t matter that I had a perfectly stable, and solid core emulator. It just gave up.
So what you do it, go into ES-DE, go to menu. Then Other Settings. Then Alternate Emulators. Then select the one that you want to be the default.
Now restart ES-DE, and load your game. Should work like gravy.
The only other reason you’d get a black screen is if you’re using a system that needs BIOS files, that you never set up.
Hope this helps someone using google in the future! Happy retro!
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TL;DR: ES-DE (all versions, this also happened on my Linux computer) assigns an emulator by default to load the games, and refuses to if it doesn’t find it (when that happened with Dolphin, I was shown a popup that suggested the LR Dolphin was not installed instead of a black screen though).
Just keeping in mind that Mesen is a cycle accurate emulator (last time I checked it was the most accurate). So the ideal solution here would have been to install Mesen.