I’m having difficulties to get RetroArch to load on my Wii U. It never loads for the first time, I just get a black screen. I’ve checked and it never even creates the Wii U folder.
So far, I’ve tried a 2 GB SD card and two 16 GB SDHC cards and I’ve had the same problem. Any suggestions?
Ive used some of the RetroArch cores on my Wii U just fine. Though Wii U is not technically an officially supported platform yet so I dunno if anyone will really be able to provide much support or not. All I can say is that I had no problems after hacking my vwii and setting up wiiflow properly, retroarch also loaded no problems. What exactly have you done to your vwii so far?
So far I’ve:
[ul][li]Softmodded my vWii[/
116t7gsn][/li][li]Installed the Homebrew Channel[/116t7gsn][/li][li]Installed USB Loader GX and a few other apps[/*116t7gsn][/ul][/li]
The other apps all load correctly. I’ve tried loading RetroArch through a forwarder, through the Homebrew Channel and through USB Loader GX. All three just result in a black screen.
I got it to work. Turns out it wasn’t a problem with the SD card or the Wii, but rather whatever RetroArch was doing when loading boot.dol for the first time. I used WiiXplorer to manually load the Genesis core instead, and now it loads fine when loading the RetroArch app. So, I’m not sure what it was doing before, but now it works.
Weird. Oh well, glad to hear you got it going, and thanks for sharing your solution 
Myself and a couple others have had similar problems on the Wii. I was never really able to find a perfect solution. I just kept messing with the SD card and what was on it and eventually Retroarch booted. I haven’t had problems since then.
Do you use a Mac too? I was wondering if some of the hidden files the Mac creates might be the problem.
I do indeed use a mac. Those hidden files are a pain, but I could never determine if they were definitely the cause. At any rate, it only seems to affect first boot… once a config file has been created I don’t have any more problems.
A while ago, I found an app on the App Store called OptimUSB which basically deletes all hidden files and then ejects the media. For $.99, it’s been very helpful.
The hidden files have the same extension as actual cores (.dol). My guess is that it loads one of those hidden junk files as a core and crashes. Why is why after it runs for the first time successfully, it always loads one of the real cores instead of the junk files.
That seems very plausible. I think that info is worth sticky-ing somewhere for future users.
Done. I included a little bit about removing the conflicting dol via CLI (which I just guessed on based on the discussion in this thread) but if you guys have a suggestion for a GUI way to do it, or if there’s anything incorrect with the bit that I posted, let me know and I’ll add that in there too/instead.
My only suggestion would be to add the “easy button” app I mentioned before:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/optimus … 3749?mt=12
It’s not free, but it’s cheap enough and does the job quickly and effectively. Plus, I had leftover iTunes credit…
The other retail GUI option is Blue Harvest, though that is pricey for such a singular need.
Interesting, I’ve wondered why I got that black screen randomly when I load it via vWii but not on a regular Wii. I actually get it quite a lot (still randomly) as it sounds like it is indeed how the boot.dol is launching in vWii. The regular Wii, loads it up perfectly ever time, never black screens on me.