Black Screen on starting ROM

[clumsy]

I have been following the instructions in the YouTube video link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeozvnb_-eI I am having an issue where I attempt to run the ROM (I have the art and everything, used the Wizard to find the ROMs, 7z file type, etc), the screen goes black and the game doesn't start. LaunchBox, RetroArch, and the ROMs are all in my secondary hard drive main directory. I'm wondering what setting I may have gotten wrong or if the ROMs are just bad or something? For reference I'm basically like 10 minutes into the video where I start having trouble. Everything before that, steps went smoothly.

[SentaiBrad]

What system are you trying to emulate? This will narrow down the issue.

[clumsy]

SNES, just like in the video.

[SentaiBrad]

If it's SNES then there should be no BIOS issue. So you had RA download the core from the Core Updater, let that download run. Make sure the core in your cores folder is a dll and not a rar. If you told RA to not unpack downloads it would still be a rar. I've also had it not unpack / download correctly if I have RA download cores one after the other. Have you tried another SNES core? bsnes balanced is what I personally use.

[clumsy]

I haven't tried another SNES core yet, no. The core in cores folder is a dll. I only downloaded the one core that was suggested in the video. I basically followed the video's instructions to a T. I'm going to try a new core now. Edit: I have tried a few different cores, to no avail. I'm still getting a black screen. I'm thinking the video is maybe skipping some steps or some setup things? I literally have done exactly what that video has said to a T. I have read different kinds of info on setting up RA that differ from what this video said to do, but I am afraid that I would just be making more mistakes or screwing it up further. Is there any info I can give to help narrow down the issue? Edit2: I got it figured out. I had to actually extract all of the games into their individual folders instead of leaving them zipped. The video kind of skipped that step (just showed the guy clicking and dragging them over to Launchbox). Thanks for the attempted help. I think I might have it figured out from here for other games as well.

[grizzly]

Followed the youtube tutorial me too and got the black screen here too. And yes i have the cores for retro arch downloaded and unpacked in the cores folder and have the right core setup in launchbox's "manage emulators". In fact i tried all nes/snes/megadrive cores and set the correct core in "manage emulators" and only got a black screen. After that i tried starting the same files from within retro arch and they worked fine from the start. So removed retroarch from launchbox and downloaded snes9x instead and set that up and got bad rom (get the same if i run the file from within snes9x so probably never unpacks). Unpacked the 7zip file and both snes9x and the snes9x and bsnes trough retroarch worked fine so tried zipping it (standard zip format) and that file worked fine (also tried rar and rar5 that did not work but did not count on it either), tried 7zip again with the standard 7zip compressing (if the original file was compressed using non standard maybe that was the problem) but did not work. So it seems that either launchbox or retroarch do not manage 7zip files correctly (but retroarch manage 7zip fine by it self so i would assume launchbox does not unpack 7zip).

[SentaiBrad]

LaunchBox doesn't care what file extension you are using, LB does nothing to help emulate anything. All it does is aggregate all of your Roms and emulators in to one beautiful location. That's why LB's a front end. The cores change what File Extensions RA needs to load, so that specific core doesn't allow loading from an archive. You add RA to the list of Emulators, making sure the file path is all correct. You don't need to touch the cores list unless you are adding / changing them. If you use the defaults, which you don't have to, then leave it alone. As long as it says -l "cores\.....dll" with the actual core name you should be good to go. Most core's have information attached to them that will tell you BIOS and file extension information. Load a core in RA. On the first tab go down to Information. Inside is Core Info. This will have information based on the Core you have loaded. Again, not all cores have info attached to them, but most do and this should help you identify the file extension your ROM's need to be in.

[scottishdad]

Same problem here. Zipped roms do not load in Retroarch when launched from Launchbox. I've checked the ROMs in my Hyperspin setup and they work fine there and Retroarch can launch them fine when running standalone. Is there some command line that has to be added when setting up Launchbox to tell it to unpack compressed files?

[scottishdad]

Just tried MAME as well and this is also a bust. ROMs run fine from within MAME and hyperspin, but when starting from Launchbox, none of the files inside the zip file can be found.

[scottishdad]

I think I might have solved this. I converted a 7z to zip using Bitser and now it works fine. Basically it seems that (at least on my system) Launchbox will not work with 7z files, only with zip. I just need to find a way of batch converting thousands of ROMs from 7z to zip. . . .

[DOS76]

LaunchBox only Launches your emulators it has no effect on what type of file you use.

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, the confusion that people are running into when coming from Hyperspin or possibily some other frontends is that LaunchBox does not yet extract ROMs from archives before launching them. Hyperspin will do that, so whether or not the actual emulator will support the zip/7z/rar files, it still works. With LaunchBox, zip/7z/rar files will only work if the emulator itself supports it. I'll be adding this feature to LaunchBox soon.