Samsung Galaxy J1 Core Updater "No Entries to Display"

RetroArch Android devices
#1

First time using RetroArch on android but this time around nothing shows up in Core Updater which was supposed to be my super smooth first step into awesome. I watched a few videos and ran a few searches but nothing relevant came up quick enough so hello! It seems not many people get this problem fresh from the play store. I highly doubt this requires root access?

Also, one of the videos I watched suggested I switch to “rgui” but I can’t even navigate the main menu with that. Wherever I touch, the cursor moves to either "Load Core or “Save Current Config”, usually the latter, and just continues overwriting that config. Is this “rgui” really needed for android?

#2

No, RGUI isn’t needed. GLUI is probably the most touch-friendly. Many people prefer XMB because it’s the nicest-looking but it pretty much requires using a control pad overlay for navigation (go to settings > onscreen overlay and disable the option to hide overlays in menus).

Not sure what to tell you about the core updater other than to make sure you’re not behind any firewalls or proxies that could be interfering. If you can’t get it to work, you can go to settings > directory and change your libretro directory to somewhere user-writeable on your internal storage (<< very important; you can’t usually load dynamic libs from external storage) and then manually download the cores from buildbot.libretro.com and plop them into that directory.

#3

What do you mean “libretro directory”? I’m looking for something in Directory? EDIT: Oh, you mean the core directory?

#4

yeah, my bad. Used to be called ‘libretro directory’ now it’s ‘core dir’

#5

Done. So it’s basically the PC version’s gui eh. Never realized how much this reminds me of my PSP. Cool though.

I’ll try to just change the directory and do it manually I guess.

#6

Okay I downloaded what cores I thought I’d want but now I have a couple more questions. They all came in a compressed archive. Should I just plop that archive in the “cores” directory untampered with? And if not, what would be the folder structure?

#7

You have to unzip them down to the *.so files. Those can go straight into cores dir

#8

Still no entries to display. How should the folder structure look? Theres a folder for every console (gameboy, playstation…) after unzipping everything that was zipped and I see no *.so files. For example, all thats in the playstation directory within the cores directory is “psxtest.exe”.

http://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/ There are no *.so files in any of these ^ What is all this junk?

EDIT: Or is this closer to where I should be looking? http://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/android/2016-08-27_cores/armeabi/There are only 11 cores in here. Not very impressive.

EDIT: Now I’m noticing the config doesn’t want to save. It seems my phone can’t even write to it’s own internal storage.

#9

This is the directory for the cores: http://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/android/latest/ What you were downloading before were testing/diagnostic/freeware ROMs you can download through the ‘add content’ menu.

I’m not sure what to tell you about configs not saving.

#10

[QUOTE=hunterk;46043]This is the directory for the cores: http://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/android/latest/ What you were downloading before were testing/diagnostic/freeware ROMs you can download through the ‘add content’ menu.

I’m not sure what to tell you about configs not saving.[/QUOTE]

How do I know which of the 3 to choose? (armeabi, armeabi-z7a or x86)?

EDIT: I went ahead and tried x86 with the Picodrive core, loaded it and tried to use Thumbnails Updater. Another fail. I don’t think any of this will update.

EDIT: Oddly enough, I happened to just root my phone and used a file manager for rooted device users because for the life of me I couldn’t find the directories in my non-root accessible file manager. I see them now. Awfully rude to just dump everything where I can’t even see it, let alone touch it. Still doesn’t solve the updater problem though.

UPDATE: I tried to move a core to the default core directory with the root file manager and the operation failed. None of this makes sense.

#11

You definitely don’t want x86. armeabi-v7a is probably what you want.

RetroArch typically puts things that users will need to interact with in user-writeable directories but Android permissions are a mess and if it can’t write to anything it will default back to its own application directory, which isn’t user-writeable.

#12

Nothing in the Online Updater works though as if it’s just failing to communicate with buildbot.libretro.com.