How to debug: roms going black and general approaches

[hughesadam87]

Most of my roms work great with the default settings in recalbox, but I've had some trouble with a few N64 and Mame roms. They all fail one of 3 ways:

1. The rom loads, the screen goes black for 4 seconds or so, and then the emulator returns to the rom selection menu.

2. (This only happened on 64 games so far) the game is loaded and I can hear the sound, but the screen is black. I can hear the game responding to button presses, just missing video.

3. (Also an n64 problem) games like pokemon stadium and mario party have missing graphic elements. For example, icons on the minigame selection in pokemon or missing dice and board markers in 64.

My first idea would be to change the underlying emulator used on the 64, but how do I add new emulators to recalbox for n64? Can't seem to find a coherent guide for it. Any other ideas on best things to try first when debugging?

I'm going to comb through the logs the next time it happens as well, but they might not mean too much, as I'm a novice at this point.

Thanks

[Substring]

@hughesadam87 Hi, short answer :

1. then the emulation didn't work. Most chances are that the emulator couldn't run your rom, or that you're missing some bios/parent/good rom version (that happens very often for arcade)
2. N64 is a little special. Does your screen handle 640x480 and 800x600 ?
3. In ES, highlight a game, press select, edit metadata, and play around with cores

The logs aren't very explicit, that's slightly improved on 4.1. What you can do (if the emulator crashes) is restart ES from SSH and watch the output on the screen once you load a rom

[paradadf]

Other things you need to consider are that the RPi isn't powerful enough to emulate all games and not all game are correctly emulated (even on powerful machines). Sometimes changing a plugin helps, but not always.

[hughesadam87]

@paradadf Thanks. What does a plugin refer to in this context? Is it the same as a core?

[hughesadam87]

@Substring Thanks.

1. The roms are all supposed to be MAME 0.78. You're saying that even so, extra bios and parents (what is a parent?) are still necessary.

2. It's been 640x480 for most games so far, I don't know about 800 x 600. You're thinking some roms are trying to run at 800 x 600, which might be why I have sound but not picture?

3. Thanks I will try. I though n64 only had one core by default, but I'm probably misrembering. Is it possible to add more cores, just for my knowledge?

[Substring]

@hughesadam87 There are already several cores included for N64 (we should rather say video plugins in that case). You can do it on a per game basis : highlight the game you wish, press select, edit metadata, change the emulator and core.

But you can't (well, you can, but i negated it because i believe that technically you can't compile for recalbox ?) add a core.

For the arcade case, please read the guides on the wiki to get a better understanding of the whole "thing"

[paradadf]

@hughesadam87 i was refering only to n64 in with that comment. On the select menu, you can choose between gliden64, rice and n64 plugin, being gliden64 the default (for s good reason).

[hughesadam87]

@Substring Hi Substring. Sorry for late response. I did finly do this, but I only have menpu64 (or something like that). There were no other cores to choose from when I did edit metadata. Do I have to enable them in a config file or something?

I'm on 4.0.0 on pi3

[Substring]

@hughesadam87 there should be 3 cores on pi3 for mupen64 ... weird