So I’ve been testing out RetroArch on my Galaxy S4 (using the Google Play Edition ROM) extensively, and I’ve gotten satisfactory results with most everything I’ve thrown at it, until I got to trying out NES emulation. For whatever reasons, games do not start at all using the Nestopia core. They do, however, start using the FCEUmm core. I doubt it’s my ROMs either, as even No Intro set ROMs have this issue, and they all work on the PC version of RetroArch anyway.
Is there an error log I could access that would shed light on this situation?
EDIT: Figured it out. My first hint was upon trying a FDS game, and to my surprise, it worked perfectly. This meant the core definitely works, so something else had to be the culprit.
And then it hit me. When I set up my system directory to put all the necessary BIOS files and such, I also added the NstDatabase.xml file for the Nestopia core, which is necessary for VS System games and Star Tropics 1 and 2 to work. I had no issues with this on PC, so I transferred it over to my phone. Remembering this, I decided to try removing it. Sure enough, with the file gone, the core loads games exactly as it should.
So yeah, there definitely seems to be an issue with the Android port wanting to load this file, but somehow failing and preventing non-FDS games from booting.