I got started with RetroArch yesterday. Amazing software! Unfortunately, because of the messy nature of my ROM folders, I eventually ended up with duplicate ROMs and made the decision to do a “fresh install.”
I took the opportunity to move the entire install to my system drive, and replaced the ROMs with some better sets. This is where the problems started. I was unable to get playlists to build at all after moving the install directory (a fresh extraction; I was not silly enough to move the configuration that was pointing to directories/files on another drive). I am beginning to suspect there is persistent data somewhere, but I can not, for the life of me, find it (I used some tools to ensure RetroArch does, in fact, only write to its own directory, and I even used an “uninstaller (Revo)” to make sure EmulationStation (tried it briefly when everything was working) hadn’t jacked anything up.
Attempting to load a ROM via “Load Content” > “Select File and Detect Core” > ROM > “Load Archive with Core” eventually leads to “No Cores Available.” Downloading the appropriate core (a core I already have), doesn’t work out and just spits me back to the original menu item. Loading a core preemptively shows up in the lower left hand corner, but when it comes time to load a game… again… “No Cores Available.”
I’ve tried 1.3.4 and 1.3.6, and the most recent nightly (and used the updater [Stellar] from these threads on it). That created playlists! The only cores showing in the nightly, however, are MAME/MESS, and they crash to desktop (another issue entirely, that I don’t care about at the moment).
I attempted all of the fixes I could find related to the info folder. I even replaced the “” with “/” under the assumption that Windows might have taken issue with swapping slash-type in the paths. Swapping back to C:\RetroArch was specifically to ensure it wasn’t related to either permissions in Program Files (one install was here) or dealing with spaces (though, the .cfg appears to handle this). On that note, I even tried full (instead of relative) paths for the folders. I tried enabling “Full Control” permissions for every user on the system, for every file for the install. I tried running as Administrator, to give it an opportunity to access whatever it wants. I installed it back onto the drive the ROMS are on. I renamed the root folder for the ROM collection to remove any characters that might be upsetting “[].” My initial install took issue with some of the characters in the folder names (all folders have since been replaced and renamed). I manually dredged through the registry, and ran quite a few “cleanup” utilities.
Actually, I did all of the troubleshooting from this post, for what appears to be the same issue, but his workaround (considering I can’t generate playlists or see any cores for any of my games even after using the nightly to do so) doesn’t work for me.
[QUOTE=roadrunner343;41477] Troubleshooting So Far:
- Verified cores/info directories were correct
- Used the built in updater to redownload core/info/assets/database
- Deleted retroarch.cfg and replaced it with retroarch-default.cfg
- Moved info files into retroarch/cores directory, and updated the info dir in RetroArch
- Since the problem first occurred after deleting/redownloading, I tried that again. Deleted all files, ran CCleaner just in case (Temp/Registry files), redownloaded 1.3.4 stable. No luck.
- Repeated all steps above but tried with a nightly build about a week ago. Same issue.
- Repeated all steps above, but am now on the 6/22 nightly. No luck.
Still no luck. If I go to load core, I can see all of the cores I have downloaded, but when I go to load a rom from any core, I still receive “No cores available.” In the bottom left corner, I also see 1.3.4 - No Core, but that may be normal since no core is currently loaded. Is there anything else I can check or do to get this working? Thanks in advance.[/QUOTE]
My actual question, because the few posts about this problem I’ve seen here or on Reddit refer back to the “info folder” path issue, and then have no additional suggestions, is about logging. Switching verbosity for logging in the UI (from 1 [INFO] to 3 [ERROR]) has no effect. Maybe there are no warnings or errors? The --verbose flag is the same. Is there a way to actually increase the logging level to troubleshoot?
Otherwise, I am left rummaging through changes in the code to see if something there can help (after all, some cores do show up in the nightly, and playlists are generating for systems that “do not have cores”). Truly amazing software, and I desperately want it to be something I can play with! 
[I]Windows 10 (x64), RetroArch 1.3.6/1.3.4/2016-09-24_nightly
[/I]EDIT WITH SOLUTION The ROM sets I replaced the originals with include [PAL] and [NTSC] releases in the same archive (without the nightly, I would not have noticed this, because the test file I opened to check this contained one file [unlucky, I suppose]). While the nightly is capable of reading inside the files to at least list one ROM, it will not play out of those archives. User error. I am sufficiently embarrased, but will leave this post here, because I suspect this is the culprit for similar posts.