Hello. Been messing with retroarch on various hardware setups. I have some older tiny computers with windows 10. For whatever reason i have never gotten retroarch to properly work with gl and xmb menu on this specific hardware. That is until this 1.6 msvc2010 build popped up in stable. Now it looks amazing and works great. However this version seems to have a lot of core issues. I have installed many cores i use in the other retro builds like atari2600 or nestopia ue. They dont load. They work in the normal retroarch 1.6. So can someone shed light on what is different between these builds and if this is a bug. I can not imagine that this is listed in stable but can not run half the cores. Any help would be great. Super easy to reproduce just extract the msvc2010 build and download atari2600 core and then try to load the core. Wont work. Text in lower left never changes. Games will say cant load core. Unless i need to install something else or a specific redistributable etc. Ill try anything. I am excited to finally have the new menu on this old hardware. Thanks for any help!
We need logs to be able to even guess what’s going on.
I will work on getting the logs up here but what is different between the 1.6 Windows version and the 1.6 msvc2010 Windows version that is making it so graphically all of a sudden the msvc2010 allows for the xmb menu system to work perfectly I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the system to know what the core difference between these two builds actually is
Ok, for comparison I dropped the msvc2010 version on my higher end pc I output to log file and when you try to load the cores that don’t work the log file only shows this :
RetroArch [ERROR] :: Failed to open libretro core: “C:\sware\RetroArch\cores\nestopia_libretro.dll” RetroArch [ERROR] :: Error(s): The specified module could not be found.
RetroArch [ERROR] :: Failed to open libretro core: “C:\sware\RetroArch\cores\stella_libretro.dll” RetroArch [ERROR] :: Error(s): The specified module could not be found.
Nothing more than that. Anyone can replicate this so you can see it, you just need either of the msvc2010 windows releases of 1.6 and the atari or nestopia cores and you won’t be able to use them.
Ok I may have solved my own issue. I copied files from the non MSVC2010 1.6 retroarch, (the root files dll’s etc) into the msvc2010 system without replacing the main exe file, and the cores load. So it looks like some of the needed files for some of the cores are not in the 7z archive for the msvc2010 build.
Ok, yeah, you’re right about it needing some libs for the cores, but it’s not the full redist. Just libwinpthread-1.dll seems to fix most of it. You might also need libstdc++6.dll and/or zlib1.dll. With those 3 in, I think you should be good.
I’m going to see if we can bundle those in or find some longer-term solution.
Awesome, I’ll cut back on the whole root. That’s great information. Not sure why the files are missing from the package, but I don’t think everyone is going to just guess on it. Any idea why visually this build is successful at running on a basic GL system and the other distro has issues? (just curious what the build difference is between the two I guess in that regard)
The program is still the same, the MSVC builds just use Visual Studio IDE and libs instead of MinGW. Dunno why it’s working better for you, but we’re glad to hear it all the same 
The additional libs needed from the redist are because sometimes the cores link against those libs, even though they really shouldn’t, when our buildbot creates them via MinGW.
Yeah it’s really interesting. It is a much older pc, running an intel 965 chipset. gl and xmb will crash on launch. D3D will run. But this MSVC build looks perfect, runs fast, and gives all the features like the boxart etc. NO idea why it is that different, but certainly not complaining Maybe it will help others with old mini pc’s and low end hardware setup some fun items.
Ah understood. Fortunately not too big of a deal. And if there are only a few that are really needed then could easily be dropped into the download. Fortunately an easy issue and not something actually corrupt in the system. The missing module error is what tipped me off so making me double check the log was definitely helpful.