Running the HW core with Vulkan renderer, the Colony Wars series does not show any video aside from the Psygnosis introduction FMV, although the main menu audio plays without any obvious issues when that FMV is skipped. When the Software core is used, the game runs perfectly fine. Other games that I have tested work fine with the HW core. I have the proper bios files with the proper md5 checksums according to both the libretro documentation and the core information from within RA itself, which says that the bios files are valid.
I have compressed my disc rom images into the chd format, so thinking that that was a cause, I tried running the same problematic games in bin/cue format, with no change in behavior. Similarly, I’ve tried multiple rom dumps aside from my own, in case mine was a bad dump, and it’s changed nothing (though considering the game works fine in software mode…) I also made sure that all shaders were turned off, as I’ve seen in my own searching on this issue that they can cause a similar problem. I have uploaded a logfile from both a Colony Wars game exhibiting this issue, and a game that functions normally.
Please let me know what else you might need from me to further diagnose this issue.