No (S)NES, Sega emulation- failed emulation almost everywhere else

[ssmith147]

I bought a Raspberry Pi B for the (primary) purpose of building an emu station for my kids, but also for the additional experience developing in C/C++ in a Linux and RasPi environment. For now, though, I would just be happy getting the emulators to work! :)

I installed the latest RetroPie image on a 16GB SDHC card. The system launches fine; I was able to expand the file system to the full 14.7 available GB, set memory split, localization, etc. I have hesitated to do any kind of updates since I tried building the entire image from scratch yesterday…and it finished 19 hours later (after tooling around with that build for the last few hours and getting nowhere, I finally resorted to installing the latest image.)

So I am running into a few problems, two of which I think are minor and I will be able to figure out (those being that 1- the HDMI video display produced by the RetroPie image is slightly larger than my 16:9 screen whereas the manual build display fit perfectly; and 2- my EtekCity faux-PS1 USB controllers are acting wonky). The REAL problem is that of no or non-functioning emulation.

First off, none of the Nintendo emus show up in the EmulationStation. The roms are present in the correct folders, but nothing is appearing when I scroll around. MAME and NeoGeo both show up, but whenever I select a ROM it tries to load then lands back at EmulationStation (I suspect I am missing a BIOS file or something). Sega is a strange hodgepodge. Only one emulator shows up- Genesis. And in that only one ROM shows up; looks like someone’s cool Homebrew project.

In fact, the only emu that seems to work is- Atari 2600 (FAIL). I was like 2 when that came out and I have no interest in reliving the diaper days of my game systems experience.

I suspect I am missing some obvious critical step but between the SNES Pi blog and the guthub documentation I’m not seeing it.

Thanks for any help offered!

[ssmith147]

OK, so having the kids in bed and not running in and out of my office all day has helped me to concentrate. I reviewed all of my notes and then began to dig into the configuration file es_systems.cfg. After looking through every line of the SNES emulator I focused on the file extensions array- and noticed that the “.zip” extension was missing! All of my roms are zipped. SO after unzipping, and replacing the zipped versions on the RasPi with the new versions- the emus began to work. SNES and NES for now- GBA, Genesis, etc coming next.

[kitchuk]

When you are wanting to use the mega drive make sure you add the .bin extension in es_systems.cfg. Also I would recommend using Picodrive if you are already not. You mentioned that the picture was slightly too big for your screen in 16:9. Try going into the es_systems.cfg again and changing the runcommand.sh from 1 to 2 and this should stop the pi from switching to 480p mode. Personally I would recommend setting your pi to output 480p in 4:3 for better performance. I also overlclocked my pi to 1ghz. Try this link [URL] https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Advanced-Configuration [/URL]

[roquen]

Sounds like you’ve figured out most of the problems. The HDMI thing might be an overscan issue in raspi-config but if not, then kitchuk’s guidance is probably best.

none of the ROMS on the pi can be compressed. It won’t see them. This is because performance would be incredibly hampered by on the fly decompression.

I do think we should have a different system for saves and game libraries, but this isn’t something I can advocate for much since I can’t program in c/c++ :P

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