So I should start by saying I am pretty new to the whole emulator scene (though not ignorant of how computers work in general), but after doing some digging Retroarch looked like the best platform to use. I am running Windows 10 on an HTPC I recently built, and initially had some trouble with installing directX 9, but got that working eventually. I followed this lifehacker pagefor instructions on getting up and running. I downloaded retroarch v 1.3.4 x86_64, used the online updater to get a few cores - bsnes-mercury basic, N64 mupen64, and one of the PSX emulators though I cannot remember right now and am away from my home computer. I downloaded all of the update links, then I set retroarch to scan a directory with one game from each system, but as soon as I initiate the scan it crashes every time. I am at a loss as to how to proceed. Please excuse me if this is a terribly obvious problem/solution. Let me know if there is other pertinent information I should post.
Dunno why it’s crashing, we’d need a log to know more (run retroarch_debug.exe from a command line with --menu --verbose and it will print errors to the console window when you encounter them), but just a note: scanning isn’t recursive, so you’ll need to scan each directory separately.
Other than that, you can try backing up your executables and replacing them with nightly builds, which have had a lot of fixes since the 1.3.4 release.
I will grab those logs when I get home then. I will also try to grab one of the nightly builds before I post the logs to see if that fixes it. I did know that there is no recursive scanning, so I dumped the ROMs into the same directory.
Do yourself a favor and try rom scanning tool lower down in this section. Retroarch’s scan feature is really annoying even if it works.
I ran the debug mode and it looks like there was a permissions problem. I was running it from program files, but for some reason that was restricting the permission to modify the directory even after I gave it full read/write permission through the Windows permissions manager. I moved it to my desktop and it works. However I am getting a runtime error when trying to run the madnafen PSX emulator - it looks like this problem has been solved here though so I should be able to figure it out. Thanks to you both for the tips.
Yeah, runtime error is usually BIOS-related.