New Retropie-installation - Consoles do not show up/no ROMs visible

klpa

Hello,
my son and I have built a little arcade and installed retropie on a raspberry 3.
Everything worked fine so far, the controller is working, but if we try to put ROMs on the retropie nothing happens. We did this via USB-stick as it is described in the manuals. The rom-folders were set up, we copied some ROMs (tried different ones) in the respective folders, put the USB-stick into the raspberry, waited, refreshed emulationstation, but nothing happens.
The retropie start-Screen is shown and it is written "13 games available". We don´t get any further. There are no consoles shown. What did went wrong?
Unfortunately my programming-knowledge isn´t very impressive and any help would be very much appreciated.
Thank you very much in advance.!

eppo2001

The easiest way is to connect the raspberry to your network and turn it on. Go to a pc in the same network and browse for network shares. There you should see the Retropie and browse to the shared folder "roms". Put your rom files in the corresponding folder (e.g. SNES roms go in the SNES folder). Go back to your raspberry and reboot... then they should show up.

klpa

Thank you very much for your very quick reply. Does this mean, that the start-screen is "normal"? Shouldn´t there be the consoles shown anyway in grey color until a ROM was loaded? What does it mean that there are "13 games available"?
I would like to know if we could suppose that our installation of the retropie itself is ok.
Thank you again.

YvesP

hello, i have exactly the same problem, tried different rom's on the sd card, installed all emulators, numerous reboots etc... no avail,
the emulators just don't show up, i am stuck in the retropie settings screen.
Now i am trying to reinstall the packages from source ....

In one instance i saw an error on the USBmount service, but i am not using the usb function,
the rom's are on the SD card and i have verified this with winscp and on the file manager of retropie

Previous version of retropie worked fine :(

thanks for your advice

dankcushions

@YvesP as per https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first please give an example of a rom that doesn't appear which you think should:

File: (File with issue - with FULL path)

klpa

We tried the following ROMs:

SNES:

Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past (U)[!].smc

SEGA Genesis:

Michael Jackson´s Moonwalker.smd
Sonic the Hedgehog.bin

NES:

Adventures of Captain Comic, The.7z

None of them showed up. I just recognized that the last one is a compressed file. Maybe that´s the reason why it doesn´t work. With the others i don´t know why.

My problem is, that I don´t know, if we should try other ROMs again or if the problem is related to the retropie-installation itself.
And I don´t understand either, why "13 games available" is written on the start screen. Are there any games pre-installed and how can you access them?

Thank you very much in advance.

P.S.: Sorry, that I cannot be more technical precise.

dankcushions

@klpa said in New Retropie-installation - Consoles do not show up/no ROMs visible:

We tried the following ROMs:

SNES:

Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past (U)[!].smc

this should be supported. however without you actually going on to your pi (via FTP/samba/etc) and getting the full file path i can't confirm it's in the right place.

SEGA Genesis:

Michael Jackson´s Moonwalker.smd
Sonic the Hedgehog.bin

same as above.

NES:

Adventures of Captain Comic, The.7z

None of them showed up. I just recognized that the last one is a compressed file. Maybe that´s the reason why it doesn´t work.

it is. see https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Nintendo-Entertainment-System for list of supported extensions.

My problem is, that I don´t know, if we should try other ROMs again or if the problem is related to the retropie-installation itself.

you haven't really given any details on your retropie installation so i can't diagnose that :) please see https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

And I don´t understand either, why "13 games available" is written on the start screen. Are there any games pre-installed and how can you access them?

the '13 games' are actually each of the scripts in the retropie menu. unfortunately ES doesn't distinguish between games and applications (etc).

YvesP

an example is : tigerheli.nes or metalgear.nes 300+ kb files that i have copy/pasted in the /nes roms folder

I always check if the filename is withouth special characters (@klpa you should also check this) and that the extension is correct following the tutorials on retropie.

I also tried an atari file and some mame's, nothing seems to work.

As i mentionned before the reinstallation from source is now running, it seems to take all day, and when this is done i will try some more and let you know.

maybe i just need to buy me a new SD card and start from scratch again ? Or maybe there is a problem with my PI1 ?

thanks for helping out

dankcushions

reinstallation from source is absolutely not what you should do. source is untested. either the current retropie image or a binary update should give you a working setup.

an example is : tigerheli.nes or metalgear.nes 300+ kb files that i have copy/pasted in the /nes roms folder

pasted where? can you give a screenshot? tigerheli.nes for example should be around 65KB.

I also tried an atari file and some mame's, nothing seems to work.

mame is a whole other subject...

YvesP

My source reinstall was my last option to trial/fix the problem, I will see what it will do, if nothing works i will format all disks and start again.

I am not in front of the pi right now but it's under \rom\nes on the SD card, when i winscp to the PI it's on the SDcard that i change the files not on the plugged in usb stick

For some reason the workflow with the usb drive that you plugin after writing "retropi" as a folder works, the sytem builds all the subfolders, i then copy/paste some roms on the usb drive, plug it back in, reboot everything but then it still doesn't recognize it, i saw that usbmount error at some point ?

maybey the usb drive /rom list and the sd card / rom list is confusing the system ?

i will put some screenshots out tonight

the tigerheli is indeed just 65 kb, the metalgear is bigger

thanks

YvesP

klpa

We could solve the problem. We reinstalled Retropie 4.1.
Then we copied some other ROMs on it and suddenly the consoles and the games appeared:-)

I think we had bad luck with the ROMs we choosed in the first time. I don´t think it was caused by the Retropie-installation itself.

Thank you again for your help and good luck with the lasting problems.

PetroRie

@klpa Sometimes the updating can cause some problems compared to a fresh install from image. I had some issues in the past since then I decided not to upgrade anymore. for me RetroPie v4.0.2 runs all games I play without any bugs etc.