Black screen after launching game with mame4all

Kaduo

Hello,

Pi Model: 1 B+
Power Supply used: a Huawei power supply sold with a cellphone
RetroPie Version Used : 4.7.1
Built From: Pre-made 4.7.1 SD image from Raspberry Pi Imager (I am assuming this is the same one as the one on the official retropie website)
USB Devices connected: Sony Dualshock 3 controller
Controller used: Sony Dualshock 3 controller
Error messages received: None, /dev/shm/ is empty
Emulator: mame4all

I have downloaded a collection of Full Non-Merged romsets for MAME 0.37b5, hoping I could play them with the mame4all emulator. However, when trying to launch any game, I get the expected "runcommand" popup, then the screen goes black and nothing happens. The green LED on my Pi is faintly blinking, indicating to me that something is happening possibly (?). The only way I have found to exit the emulator from there is to unplug then replug the Pi (I have tried a bunch of different inputs on my controller, including Start+Select, but none of them seem to do anything).

For reference, I did most of my testing with the game 1941: Counter Attack (World 900227) (for no particular reason except for the fact that it's one of the first games of my collection when it's sorted in alphabetical order).

I did some checks to ensure my romsets were compatible with the emulator I wanted to use:

On the site I downloaded them from, multiple positive comments mentioned the fact that they ran well on a RetroPie system with the mame4all emulator.
I rebuilt then validated the whole romset collection (following this guide) with the mame4all-no-clones-no-neogeo.xml file which can be found here. I did get a few (5) missing rom errors when scanning the rebuilt collection, however since the romsets are Full Non-Merged I don't expect a missing rom from game A to affect game B (please correct me if I am wrong in this assumption). In any case, 1941: Counter Attack was not one of the games with a missing rom file.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

dankcushions

@kaduo said in Black screen after launching game with mame4all:

Error messages received: None, /dev/shm/ is empty

/dev/shm should always be populated after anything is launched via retropie. runcommand.info and runcommand.log are always generated. note they do not persist after a reboot. how are you checking for these files?

Kaduo

@dankcushions said in Black screen after launching game with mame4all:

/dev/shm should always be populated after anything is launched via retropie. runcommand.info and runcommand.log are always generated. note they do not persist after a reboot.

Well, then it makes sense that I am not seeing anything, because the only way that I found to go back to retropie from the black screen is by "manually" rebooting (unplugging and replugging the Pi). I will search some more for a way to cleanly exit the emulator in order to get some logs and keep you updated.

EDIT: I ran emulationstation from the command line and made it so that it would timeout after a while, so that I could get back to retropie without having to reboot. I now have a runcommand.info, but still no runcommand.log. Here are the contents of runcommand.info :

arcade
mame4all
/home/pi/RetroPie/arcade/1941.zip
/opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all/mame "1941"

EDIT 2: The game works with the lr-mame2000 emulator. Could anyone tell me if I understand this correctly: even though "mame4all" is the recommented Mame emulator for the Pi 1 on this page, there are actually multiple versions of "mame4all": mame4all-pi (which I had been using so far without success) and lr-mame2000 (which I just discovered works, at the very least with 1941). Is this a correct interpretation?

dankcushions

@kaduo said in Black screen after launching game with mame4all:

EDIT 2: The game works with the lr-mame2000 emulator. Could anyone tell me if I understand this correctly: even though "mame4all" is the recommented Mame emulator for the Pi 1 on this page, there are actually multiple versions of "mame4all": mame4all-pi (which I had been using so far without success) and lr-mame2000 (which I just discovered works, at the very least with 1941). Is this a correct interpretation?

yes, although technically it's accurate to say there are two versions of mame 0.37b5 - these two forks of this are slightly different. lr-mame2000 is not based off of mame4all, but both forks of mame 0.37b5.

Kaduo

@dankcushions Thank you very much for the clarification! I guess my original problem is solved now.