Netplay broken in 1.8.5

Latest release freezes when I deactivate/stop hosting a game, tested in 2 machines in different places/ip, both Windows 10 updated.

Edit: I have used netplay many times before.

1 Like

I have the same problem, are you playing SNES games? if yes, i solved this problem by NOT using SNes9x - current or SNes9x - 2010…

The problem seems only to occur when using those two cores with 1.8.5 tho, works fine with 1.8.4.

Tested in Windows 10 and Linux 5.5 (Archlinux).

Hey guys We we were using Mac OS Sierra 10.12 and a Windows 10 and we got Netplay to work with the Windows machine hosting using a relay and SNES9x Current for about a half of football. Then the windows machine got kicked out. Whenever hosting was tried again, it was a black screen with the pause symbol on it. The mac tried to host and could not host either. SNES9x 2010 same problem. We switched to 2005 and there was no video (only audio) for the game on my end…tried 2002 and my controller didn’t work. Switched to BSNES and it gave him the “couldn’t find a suitable core or content file, load manually” error. The point of all this is…so many options, and nothing is working… Does anyone have WORKING SNES netplay options?

unfortunately no, i messed around with all the options that could have something do do with emulation and network but no luck, what’s worse is that no mod or adm seems to care about this too, so for the time being, just use 1.8.4.

Continuing the discussion from Netplay broken in 1.8.5:

So, for anyone trying to play SNES online, try the following.

Download the latest release: Here

Download the old 1.8.4 binary: Here

Extract retroarch and then replace the NEW retroarch.exe with the OLD one you downloaded.

@jeffmellinger in your case, you can download the older mac version Here and use it instead.

Great! Thanks for the help. For the windows version, you listed two downloads. What exactly do I do with each of those? The “latest release” is Retroarch.7z The “old 1.8.4 binary” is 2020-02-01_RetroArch.7z You said to extract retroarch and replace the NEW .exe (I assume you mean the 1.8.5 that I have currently installed?) with the OLD one I downloaded…there is a .exe file in each of the two zip files I downloaded. From which of the two downloads do I extract the retroarch.exe? What do I do with the other download? Thanks again

just paste the contents of “2020-02-01_RetroArch.7z” into your retroarch folder, so the 1.8.5 .exe’s get replaced by the 1.8.4 .exe’s from “2020-02-01_RetroArch.7z”

you can check if you got it right by looking at the version at the corner.

Ok got it! Looks like that all went fine. I started a Netplay with SNES current and loaded content…it definitely does not make any of the errors it made that I listed above! So now I’ll need to get my Mac partner to get 1.8.4 and see if it works. I’ll let you know!

Ok so on the Mac, we put 1.8.4 in. In 1.8.5, when trying to download cores, the screen looked like this:

which was basically the same as how the windows one looked (except far less available cores for Mac)

On 1.8.4, Windows cores are same as before, but on the Mac, they now look like this:

Even though the selected core, as denoted at the bottom of screen, matches the one I used on the windows computer when i set up netplay, when we use the Mac to find the room of the windows computer, we get this error on the Mac: couldn’t find a suitable core or content file. We’re not sure why this is happening, but it seems to have to do with the core list that shows up in 1.8.4?

Additionally, now when we try to use 1.8.5 to play non-netplay on the Mac, it doesn’t work right anymore. Not sure we followed the correct steps bringing 1.8.4 onto the Mac

they look like that because you need to update your core-info files, and for the games not playing right, you can try a full uninstall of retroarch on mac, delete every config file, and then install it again, i have never used mac in my life, so i’m not sure how it works there, i guess .dmg files are installers right?

Yeah that makes sense thanks. Where/how do the core-info files get updated? Probably need to do the uninstall part on mac first…not sure they make it as simple as when you directed me to copy the 3 files from the fresh RA download over top of their counterparts…it was that easy on Windows.

Same problem between 3 macs. Not running even in LAN and remote. it also looks like most netplay rooms are using 1.8.1

this goes along the line of " failed to Initialize netplay " or " Player " " Joined " " netplay disconnected"

We completely uninstalled 1.8.5 on the Mac, put 1.8.4 in and we were able to play between Mac and windows! One thing though, the Mac is saying “core does not support saved states” when using SNES current…anyone know anything about how to load saved states on mac?

I can confirm that going back to 1.8.4 on a fresh install fixed the netplay crashing issues for me as well.

I also noticed that if I host through the relay that this freezing issue doesn’t occur on 1.8.5, whereas if I try to host directly it freezes up the game…although you can get back into the menu…

Try out tomorrow’s nightly. Try it out in a netplay session between two people on the same numbered nightly.

If that works, we’ll push out a new 1.8.7 release so that everybody has a new stable again where netplay is reliable.

No more freeze issues going in and out of the menu, or trying to stop hosting! I also noticed a lot less desync while using the relay server in the latest nightly. Definitively an improvement over 1.8.5!

1 Like

i am getting netplay error while both devices are using latest RetroArch Plus android app, same rom. any idea?

Are you trying with the same core, as well? If you’re using bsnes, try using snes9x-current instead. It handles the rollback-based netplay better.