Nestopia issues (black screen) following Retropie 4.1.10 update

Citro

Greetings all,

I'm totally new to Retropie (so far, 2 days of tinkering under my belt), so please forgive me if my issue has an obvious solution :)

I set up Retropie (on a Raspberry Pi 3 B kit from Canakit) yesterday and up until a few minutes ago had no problems whatsoever with any aspect of this amazing hardware and software. I've been toying with several emulators, all of which work beautifully. I decided to "Update all packages" using the Retropie setup script. About 20 minutes later, everything appeared to have installed/updated correctly (no errors listed anyway).

Strangely, following the update I'm having issues with NES emulation. I first noticed something was up when Retroarch fired up lr-fceumm instead of nestopia, a setting I had changed previously. As lr-fceumm is the default, I figured nothing of it, switched back to Nestopia and hit OK. My screen then turned black, a few seconds passed, and I was returned to the NES games listing in Emulationstation.

The issue is quite reproducible, and only affects some of the roms (including many that I had successfully ran prior to the update). I've reset and shutdown/re-started the Pi to no avail. I've tried updating Nestopia from the "Source" and from "Binary" (I'm embarrassed to say I have no idea what the difference is, other than source takes significantly longer and displays much more code :). All of the other emulators I have installed still work perfectly.

Has anyone else experienced this issue following an update? I tried searching the forum but couldn't find anything else quite like this. If additional information is required (I wasn't sure if I should list the names of affected roms on this forum) please let me know. Thanks in advance for any advice you would care to offer!

columboscoat

@Citro First off updating from binary is updating from a (generally) stable release. Updating from source is what is known as "bleeding edge". From source you will get the most up to date code but you may get a few bugs. Best to avoid using it unless you know exactly what you are doing and how to roll back / recover if stuff goes tits up.

columboscoat

@Citro Try unzipping the NES ROMs and they should be in a .nes file. Try these. If that doesn't work try putting them in a .zip file with zero compression.

Citro

@columboscoat Thanks for the information regarding binaries vs. source.

My nes roms are already unzipped and found in the .nes format. The next thing I'm going to try is checking the "headers"; I've read that missing headers can result in an issue like this...

Citro

@Citro Figured out the issue. Had nothing to do with the emulator; for some reason, the affected roms were 0Kb in size... not sure what happened, but when I re-copied roms to the Pi, they worked perfectly.

Thanks again @columboscoat