Retroarch - PCSX2 & Flycast Cores not working in windows 7

General
#1

Hello All,

Just thought I’d post this to help others.

TLDR: pcsx2 and Flycast, ‘failed to load libretro core’ message on win7 install of retroarch. ‘Upgrading’ to win10 solved the problem.

I’ve been successfully running the latest retroarch (1.9.14 I think) with CRTemudriver on my freshly installed Windows 7 pc, but I just couldn’t get the PS2 and Dreamcast cores (PCSX2 and Flycast) to work. All other cores were good (bsnes, dolphin, beetle (ps1), mame, finalburn, n64 to name a few).

I was fairly confident I had all the bios’ and rom files correctly annotated/positioned, so figured it must’ve been a dependency thing, so I installed every windows 7 update, every historic version of Direct X I could find, and every version of MS Visual C++ Dist. But nothing made any difference. I was still getting the ‘failed to load libretro core’ message. I also installed the standalone version of pcsx2 and that worked fine.

Eventually I installed RA on another machine running Win 10 pc to see if that might work and, strangely, it did.

I’ve now installed Win10 on my Win7 pc as well and unsurprisingly all the cores, including PCSX2 and Flycast are now working. I had to reinstall crtemudriver but that didn’t take long.

So there you go, problem solved. I prefer win7 so if anyone can shed any light on why those cores didn’t work in Win7, and how I might get them working in win7, please let me know.

Cheers

Harry

#2

PCSX2 no longer supports Windows 7 and 8, which is mentioned in this progress report: https://pcsx2.net/295-q2-2020-progress-report.html

The last stable PCSX2 version to work on Windows 7 is v1.6.

I just tested the most recent FlyCast core, and it works fine on my Windows 7 machine. At least with the GL video driver, d3d11 has major graphic issues.

update: after some more testing, the PCSX2 core does indeed work on Windows 7 as Jamirus mentioned! Specifically I used the d3d11 renderer and game tested was Tetris World (as bin file).

#3

PCSX2 core works for me (version from 15.01.2022) with Windows 7. Also standalone Dev. 1.7 version sort of works, issue is no audio support, but I only use standaloen to test some things, so no need really.

One interesting thing I just obverserved is that I needed to switch to glcore manually, I had direct3d by default and PCSX2 would boot, but shaders made obvious that it’s rendering incorrectly.

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#4

Strange, but very interesting - thanks for your feedback guys. I’m guessing you’re running on ‘established’ machines ie not fresh installs? I still wonder if I was missing some kind of obscure file due to my fresh Win7 install - i’ve just realised I forgot to mention this in my OP.

In win7, I did try testing with each video driver to see if that would help, but I got the same ‘failed to load core’ error. And when I installed windows 10 onto my windows 7 machine (win10 was not a fresh install btw, it was ‘on top’ of my win7 install), I made no changs to my retroarch settings (still running GL driver).

Incidentally, I did another fresh Win7 install on another PC and ran RA without CRTemudriver (just to see if that was the issue) and got the same errors with pcsx2 and flycast. This was running RA from the RA folder that I’d copied from the working win10 machine where all cores work without issue.

If anyone reading this has the time or inclination to do a fresh windows 7 install and test with RA 1.9.14, i’d be curious to hear your results.

But perhaps there are just too many hardware/software variables to pin this one down…