Retro Pie 4.2 PSX "Bios not found"

pjft

Please share exactly how your USB drive is mounted. What are the contents of fstab?

Thanks.

Skull Knight

Upon looking in the file manager at /home/pi/RetroPie/
I have found that the BIOS folder is missing is there anyway to create a new folder or will I have to re-install retro pie?

pjft

@Skull-Knight You can certainly create it, but as I asked before, can you share the contents of your fstab file for mounting?

You may be mounting at the wrong mount point. I expect you will have an actual BIOS folder, but it's being hidden as you may be mounting your USB drive on the RetroPie folder.

Skull Knight

@pjft
Im sorry I am new to all this can you explain what fstab is? and where I can find it.

pjft

@Skull-Knight Sure.

In the command line at your Pi / via SSH, type

cat /etc/fstab

dankcushions

i'm guessing, but i don't think either are running roms from USB, but rather using it to transfer via https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Transferring-Roms#usb-stick

i'm not sure if this works to transfer BIOS files.. someone else said as much in another thread (can anyone confirm). if it doesn't, you'll have to use SFTP or samba transfers via wireless or a network cable.

(or you could copy it from the stick via the linux commandline, but that requires a bit more explanation)

Skull Knight

@pjft
upon looking I have received an almost exact replica of what appears in the fstab section of this page.
(https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive)

Skull Knight

This post is deleted!

pjft

@Skull-Knight Can you confirm the exact line of your USB mount point?

Is it something like

UUID=<drive ID> /home/pi/RetroPie      vfat    nofail,user,uid=pi,gid=pi 0       2

?

If so, it means you're mounting on the RetroPie folder - just like me, so I know the set up.

It means your BIOS folder is currently in the SD card, but you're mounting over it.

You could certainly create a new folder on your USB drive, but the standard BIOS folder will usually already have some required BIOS files there.

My recommendation, as awful as it may seem, is:

Boot your Pi without your USB drive there
Now, as you navigate to the BIOS folder you will see one there
Plug in a second USB drive (not THAT one you're using) and copy the BIOS folder to it
Now copy the BIOS folder from that USB drive to the one you're using
Restart your Pi with the USB drive plugged in

If that's not the case at all (i.e. if you're just doing what @dankcushions is suggesting) then, sure, you may just create a BIOS folder there, but I'm struggling to figure out why the folder would not exist there in the first place.

Skull Knight

@pjft

The only reason I can think of as to why the bios folder is not there is because I had to move everything to a new SD card as I ran out of space on the old one and maybe as it was moving everything for some reason it skipped on the bios folder.

pjft

@Skull-Knight Yeah, that could have been it then. I'd hope (unconfirmed) that if you go to the RetroPie-Setup script and update/install all packages again, the folder will be created... maybe?

Try it with the PSX emulator, see if it creates it. But yes, you can create it yourself - and, as long as you don't run into problems with other emulators, I suppose you'll be fine-ish. But yeah, if any emulator doesn't behave as expected, I'd suggest it could be related to that.

Skull Knight

@pjft

Ok I just looked back in the file manager and have found that the BIOS folder has reappeared inside the folder is

/fba
/mame2003
/palettes
*NstDatabase.xml
fast.bin
skip.bin
system.bin

I have no idea how the folder came back or if it was there all along and I was dumb enough not to see it but it still does not explain why the psx bios wont work.

pjft

@Skull-Knight Well, it does, right?

I don't see any PSX Bios file in it :)

Skull Knight

Ohhhhh that explains it how do I create a psx bios folder?

pjft

@Skull-Knight You'll need to get the proper PSX Bios file and copy it there.

Where or how to get it is outside the scope of this forum, but they should reasonably easy to find using most search engines.

Follow the guidelines from this thread, or the wiki, on what file names to look for.

That being said, some PSX games will not run anyway, regardless of the BIOS file, so bear that in mind. PCSX-Rearmed doesn't support every single game, so if the BIOS warning stops showing up but the game you're trying to run doesn't work, either try to get it from a few different sources to see if it's a dump thing, or if it's just a compatibility thing.

Best of luck.

Skull Knight

What format do they have to be put into the BIOS folder as?
in a zip file,on their own,ETC

pjft

@Skull-Knight On their own. As described in the wiki page.

It should be something like scph<something>.bin, I believe, but the wiki is pretty much accurate.

Skull Knight

@pjft

I have fixed the problem It turns out that upon plugging my usb back in that the BIOS were just not copying to the BIOS folder so in the file manager I copied them manually and that solved the problem.

Thank you for helping me

edmaul69

@pjft can you tell me some of the u.s. roms that dont work?

pjft

@edmaul69 hmm. I don't know any US specific ROMS that don't work - and sorry if I sounded more like an expert in the subject than I really wanted to.

I know that ISS2000 does not run on the emulator, and I believe that in the emulator's GitHub page there are a few bugs filed on some games, so that's kind of what I meant by "not all games work". I didn't mean to suggest that there were a lot of them, sorry:)

Any particular game you'd be looking for, though?