Silent failures under Raspbian (Pi 4)

First, the exact same thing worked on Pi 3 B+.

Using Raspbian, I moved the root partition to a separate SSD, installed retroarch using apt, and now things fail silently and nothing really works. To boot, the updater menu didn’t have a cores option, so I had to set show cores menu in the .cfg to true. The buildbot link for the cores was empty so I pointed it to neon/latest.

When I download a core (it does see and try), it downloads showing no error, but there is no sign of it ever downloading, core selection remains empty. I manually downloaded all cores from armhf and neon and put them in /home/pi/.config/retroarch/cores/ but using various naming schemes for the objects and directories they never show. If I try to launch anything, it just crashes. The ROMS are the same result. I tried the scanner with zipped nes, snes, neogeo and n64 ROMS, and while they clearly scan, none of them are added to anything.

So while all directories are readable, and Retroarch is clearly reading the configs and saving them, nothing else is really working… but it’s apparently as close as can be without actually really working. Clearly this is on me, I messed something up but not sure what.

Can you post a log in which you try to do some things that aren’t working? like downloading a core, trying to load a core, etc?