I got an Odin Pro about a month ago, and your experience looks very familiar. I went through the Retro Game Corps setup guide* I linked upthread, did everything it said to do, and... nothing worked. Literally everything I wanted to use it for had some problem that needed troubleshooting.
*Speaking of which, they have a Retroid Pocket guide as well that might be helpful.
I did eventually get most of it figured out, with the help of various patient people on various Discord servers for various emulation programs and on the r/OdinHandheld subreddit, but for the longest time I felt like I was never more than about 80% set up. I'm not an Android newbie or an emulation newbie, but apparently emulation on Android is a different beast.
So you're not alone. Best general advice I can give you is to focus on one thing at a time. Find a game that you really want to play, do whatever troubleshooting you need to do to get it to play, then make sure to actually play it for at least a couple hours before moving on to the next issue.
As far as specific advice:
- the big one is that [Retroarch] just hangs on a black screen when called from Daijisho. Daijisho seems to work fine with every standalone emulator I’ve given it. The exception to this is FinalBurn Neo. I thought it might be due to a missing core but I’ve tried adding all possible cores and Daijisho also seems to know when a core isn’t there.
In my experience this kind of issue nearly always comes down to Daijisho trying to launch a different version of the emulator than you have installed. In Daijisho, when you have a particular platform (e.g. SNES) selected, go to the Edit button on the bottom right (to the right of the button that says Paths). Scroll down a little to Player Settings, and look at the Default Player dropdown menu. Often there will be multiple versions of a given emulator listed on the dropdown , and Daijisho isn't always great about auto-selecting the one you actually have. Do a little trial-and-error and see if selecting a different one fixes it.
One thing I’ve noticed is that many of the standalone emulators are only available as a paid version or have a paid version to unlock features or remove ads. I don’t mind paying if it’s quality, so any advice here?
The paid emulators I have used are:
Mupen64Plus-FZ (for N64) - The free version is perfectly functional, the upgrade only removes ads and allows cloud saves which I don't really use, but it's also only $4 so I see it as more of a "thank you" to the devs for the base features.
Redream (for Dreamcast) - Upgrading from the free version unlocks upscaling, which is highly recommended; the RP3+ has the horsepower to run virtually every Dreamcast game at 2x resolution (1280x960), which makes them look MUCH clearer and less muddy. The upgrade is only $6 which is pretty reasonable IMO.
I've heard good things about the Drastic DS emulator, which is paid, but I haven't messed with it.
Drastic is fantastic. I can’t say enough good about it. It works and works well. The only nitpick is that the confirm button gets mixed up when confirming if you only use buttons (b and a).
Redream is worth the money too.
hbi2k gave great advice, so I just want to add for emphasis to definitely focus on one thing at a time. It sounds like you probably have multiple Retroarch versions or the right ones. Retroarch worked perfectly on the RP3 for me, especially once I configured it to my liking. But I definitely focused on getting it setup before moving on to anything else.
That’s the big benefit of the Retro Game Corps guides. There are an overwhelming number of options for Retroarch, so it helps to have a guide to walk through them when you’re just getting started.
Either way for me once I used the exact version of Retroarch he recommended it worked great. I would go so far as to say you should leave Daijisho out of the mix until you’ve sorted out Retroarch.
Thanks guys.
Up front, yes, I followed through the Retro Game Corps guides, both the Retroid Pocket one and the Retroarch one. I haven't looked closely at the Android yet.
One additional problem I forgot to mention, Retroarch just doesn't want to find the bios files. First I just dumped a complete set of supported bios files in the system folder. Then I tried my own cut of just the bios files I would theoretically need. Finally I tried pointing Retroarch at a different folder. Nope.
In my experience this kind of issue nearly always comes down to Daijisho trying to launch a different version of the emulator than you have installed. In Daijisho, when you have a particular platform (e.g. SNES) selected, go to the Edit button on the bottom right (to the right of the button that says Paths). Scroll down a little to Player Settings, and look at the Default Player dropdown menu. Often there will be multiple versions of a given emulator listed on the dropdown , and Daijisho isn't always great about auto-selecting the one you actually have. Do a little trial-and-error and see if selecting a different one fixes it.
I thought so too. But when I try selecting a different Retroarch (there are 3 options, something like "retroarch", "retroarch 32", "retroarch 64"), it correctly comes back with the message, something like, "not installed/available". Then it gives me the option to search for installed apps and comes back with retroarch 64, the one I currently have installed.
I tried googling this error but nothing obvious came up.
So you're not alone. Best general advice I can give you is to focus on one thing at a time. Find a game that you really want to play, do whatever troubleshooting you need to do to get it to play, then make sure to actually play it for at least a couple hours before moving on to the next issue.
Yeah, I was thinking along these lines. I really want to do a Phantasy Star series play through. So, currently I can manually select the first game, browse the archive, select the correct rom file, and it all plays great after that. So, yep, I should just get to playing!
so I just want to add for emphasis to definitely focus on one thing at a time. It sounds like you probably have multiple Retroarch versions or the right ones. Retroarch worked perfectly on the RP3 for me, especially once I configured it to my liking. But I definitely focused on getting it setup before moving on to anything else.
Yeah, I hear you. Unfortunately I'm probably out of patience with Retroarch for now. I actually really miss the days of just downloading an emulator for the game I want to play, tweaking a few easy to understand options, and getting to it! I get that having a unified system which you can setup once and then handle multiple platforms is attractive but it's just too much for my needs. I think it really benefits those who want to enjoy a lot of exotic platforms but for someone like me who just wants to play the more popular 8-bit/16-bit platforms, just being able to download 3-4 emulators that mostly work out of the box is a better choice.
My immediate todo list:
- redo all my zip archives, hopefully stopping macOS adding hidden files this time.
- Convert GC games over to a supported format or just reverting to the ISOs.
- PSP games, as above.
Thanks for the emulator recommendations. Looks like Drastic and Redream for now.
The other thing I'm interested in, any game engines for classic PC games. For example, Exalt, the engine for Ultima 7 is available on Android. Doom of course. Anything else worth checking out?
I'm taking notes on all this. I'm probably going to order an Odin Lite next month and I'm sure I'll run into similar issues.
Yup, one of my big mistakes was aggressively converting all my iso and bin files to chd. Which I'm sure I saw recommended in one of the guides I read but oh well...
So, in the end I will go with the following formats:
PSP - .cso <- that will be a batch process I'll leave going tonight.
GC - .rvz <- almost finished! Dolphin (MacOS) makes this really straightforward.
PS2/PS1/DC/TurboGrafx CD - OK as .chd
Sega CD/Sega Saturn <- .bin + .cue
Finished
- I've rezipped all my cart based games, minus the Mac OS bs. Basically, the default Archive utility thought it important to include those hidden files in the archive. Using Keka instead solved that.
- Restored all .chd to iso/bin/cue where required.
To do:
- The Retroarch bios problem is likely the reason for TurboGrafx CD not working since that definitely requires a bios file (many emulator cores don't these days). I need to figure that out.
- I took a subset of Finalburn NEO games that I wanted and I thought I pulled all the files I needed. But apparently a few are missing here and there.
- Buy/install paid versions for Drastic and Redream.
- Do more AetherSX2 investigation. Seemed promising at first, some silky smooth 3D scenes and animations. But I've noticed the sound is pretty glitchy and, when the music is synced to the animation, you get all kinds of frame rate stutters.
From the JRPG quarterly thread, we were talking about a GBA game. So I've been trying out the free version of Pizza Boy on my phone the last few days. Seems great.
I was able to import .sav files from desktop Visual Boy Advance and pick right up where I left off on a few games. Connected my Dualsense and was able to use that for both Metroid games. I've been dabbling in one of the Fire Emblem games with onscreen controls since those aren't twitchy at all.
The free version even has speed up and slow down toggles. I had to use that for a couple of Metroid speed item pickups last time I played so pretty cool it's in this so accessible. Just an FYI for anyone trying Android, this one works well. 4.7 stars on store and easily that good
AFAIK the Retroid Pocket 3+ is below the minimum specs for AetherSX2. Some folks have had some amount of success getting lighter games to run anyway, but I'd suggest seeing it as a bonus if you can get anything to work.
The Odin Pro is more powerful than the RP3+ and I still notice some amount of slowdown and/or glitchiness in most games; it's just barely above the AtherSX2 dev's minimum specs.
Yeah, I didn't have high expectations initially, it was the first impressions of high frame rate 3d animations that got my hopes up. As it is, if you don't mind disabling sound, it could be that most games will have great performance.
AFAIK the Retroid Pocket 3+ is below the minimum specs for AetherSX2. Some folks have had some amount of success getting lighter games to run anyway, but I'd suggest seeing it as a bonus if you can get anything to work.
The Odin Pro is more powerful than the RP3+ and I still notice some amount of slowdown and/or glitchiness in most games; it's just barely above the AtherSX2 dev's minimum specs.
The JRPG player in me has had pretty good success with AtherSX2. Your tolerance will vary but I’m going to test Wild Arms series soon and Xenosaga soon.
Dragon’s Quarter was a little too slow but I think that was the normal for even the original PS2.
Out of curiousity, what games have you tried so far? Hopefully our backlogs match up!
Fwiw, I don’t think most games need to be zipped. All my GBA, SNES files, etc. aren’t zipped. So the only MacOS hidden file nonsense I typically deal with is periodically disabling Spotlight and removing the Spotlight files from the root folder of the SD card.
Yeah, I was just trying to squeeze out some extra space on my SD card. Of course, the big saving is apparently removing all that trash data on GC games. Something I wasn't aware of!
Okay, time for a big update. Things are going much better now. Retroarch can still die in a trash fire. Well, not really, but it's unfortunate that it's still probably the best way to emulate a large selection of hardware on Android.
The Retroarch bios problem - still a problem. But I recalled the typical workaround of just dumping the bios files each game needs in the same folder as the game. Depending on your layout, you may end up with multiple copies of the same bios but who cares really. Fixed a bunch of errors.
Finalburn Neo - the bios problem rears its head again. So dropped neogeo.zip into the game dir, that fixed a bunch. For others, I was confused by the regional naming differences across the same rom set. A typical arcade set would be gamename.zip for the main board, then additional zips just for the parts that are different in each version, say gamenamej.zip for Japan, gamenameu.zip for US, gamenameuh.zip for a hacked version of the US board, etc. etc. What confused me was that some games use their regional names even though they are basically the same game. For example, gradiusu.zip (US version of Gradius) might need nemesis.zip (base version of Gradius using Japanese naming). That example is just off the top of my head, might not be completely accurate. But I ran into about 4-5 games like this. Anyway, when Finalburn Neo core fails to load a game due to a missing zip, it does kindly tell you exactly the names of the zips it expects to find which makes the process of fixing the issue fairly straightforward.
Of course you could get around this just by keeping the full FB Neo set of playable games but I'm only nostalgic for a handful of games so I didn't want to use up all that space.
Gamecube .rvz - This was a weird one. Dolphin for Handheld could play by my newly created .rvz files just fine. However, when Daijisho called Dolphin for Handheld to play a game, there would be some kind of missing file error (it previously worked with the vanilla isos). Fixed by replacing Dolphin for Handheld with plain Dolphin from the Play Store.
Lynx - There are two cores in Retroarch. The one that Daijisho calls by default just doesn't work for me so switched to Handy. No probs.
Amiga - For some reason, Daijisho defaults to a Retroarch core that doesn't even seem to be available in the Android version of Retroarch. Fixed by switching to puae.
Saturn/Yaba Sanshiro 2 - realized that YS2 actually does accept CHDs. Okay, converted bins back to chds and saved a bunch of space!
Sega CD - similarly, realized that the Picodrive core also accepts CHDs. This solved an annoying problem in Daijisho. When Daijisho scans for games, it ignores the .cue file and picks up every .bin file it can find. So, if your game has, say, 1 data bin, and 20 music track bins, Daijisho will tell you that you have 21 versions of that game installed. At that point, you just need to manually delete all the music track bins. I'm not even sure if would still work, surely it needs the cue information. More on that in a sec.
Outstanding issues:
Sega CD - just refuses to work. Bios files are now in the game directory. I've tried both chd and bin. All the different cores. Error message is simply "Failed to load content".
Turbografx CD - as above except the result is a hard crash of Retroarch.
Searching around for solutions, it does seem that these are 2 of the more common platforms to cause issues. Hmm. But at this point I don't really have anything else I can think of to try.
Emulation status:
Dreamcast/reDream - 1280x960, looks fantastic. Flawless.
GC/Dolphin - 720p, way above expectation. Frame rate seems to go between 30-60fps depending on the scene, but absolutely nothing that seems strange to me from comparing to original hardware. Looks gorgeous.
PS2/AetherSX2 - I tweaked a bunch of settings using recommendations I found. It fixed the slowdown I was getting in the Suikoden 3 intro and everything seems basically fine now. It's at the point where I'll need to sit down and actually play a game to evaluate it properly.
N64/M64Plus FZ - Did N64 games used to look this good? I played around a bit, there might have been a couple of hitches but it was very difficult to tell.
PS1/Duckstation - Just dabbled a little, seems great.
Saturn/Yaba Sanshiro 2 - I needed to tweak a couple of settings, again just dabbled a little, seems promising so far.
PSP/PPSSPP - really just checked it loads properly.
DS/DraStic - it will be a while before the interface becomes second nature but everything looks fantastic.
3DS/Citra Enhanced - emulation seems mostly accurate but performance is not where it needs to be to be playable. Apparently there is a fork called Citra MMS that performs better on low end systems, I need to try it.
Sega MS&Gen/Retroarch cores - yep, this works as you'd hope. Presumably all the 16-bit systems and below will play just great.
Daijisho Interface - got this set up now and, yup, works great.
Overall, I'm extremely impressed by the performance I'm experiencing. I'm not an Android fan and definitely not a Retroarch fan but I really respect what Retroid has done here in trying to make the experience as approachable as possible. I honestly don't blame them for any of the issues I've experienced.
Recommended.
3DS/Citra MMS update - What is this?! I put in some time, basically seems like native level performance, running at 2x. Like DraStic, the hardest part is just getting the dual screens setup in a way that's comfortable. I do need to put in some time to try to figure out if there are any noticeable shortcuts in the emulation. No idea what the difference is between MMS and vanilla but it must be significant. The drawback is that, for whatever reason, Citra MMS doesn't support save states. So, in-game saves only.
I would worry too much about 3DS. My understanding is that there’s not much it can emulate. When I had the Odin Pro even it couldn’t really emulate 3DS well.
Funnily enough, that was something I was going to ask. Is there a portable device that's good for 3DS emulation? My 3DS died recently and I'm hoping to replace it with something more versatile.
I'm guessing I'm better off just buying another 3DS and hacking it to also be an emulation machine?
Funnily enough, that was something I was going to ask. Is there a portable device that's good for 3DS emulation? My 3DS died recently and I'm hoping to replace it with something more versatile.
I'm guessing I'm better off just buying another 3DS and hacking it to also be an emulation machine?
Steam Deck, or maybe one of the Aya Neo Windows handhelds that cost as much as a good gaming laptop because that's basically what they are but with a controller shell instead of a keyboard.
Short of that, yeah, there's still no substitute for actual Nintendo hardware for the price.
I must have worded it strangely but the first game I tried, Rune Factory 4, seems to run great and that’s at 2x upscaling. I really couldn’t believe it. Note, this is Citra MMS, not the vanilla version.
Funnily enough, that was something I was going to ask. Is there a portable device that's good for 3DS emulation? My 3DS died recently and I'm hoping to replace it with something more versatile.
I'm guessing I'm better off just buying another 3DS and hacking it to also be an emulation machine?
If you like I can explore more games and try and determine how viable it is.
Interesting. I would take games like that as a nice surprise unless there’s some leap Citra has made.
Okay, here’s the reality check:
Samus Returns - 30fps/1X. Needed to tweak settings to get rid of audio glitches.
Pokémon Sun & Moon - Not really playable. Runs between 30fps and 5-15fps with glitchy sound.
Hey, it’s a $150 device so I’m still amazed.
I would worry too much about 3DS. My understanding is that there’s not much it can emulate. When I had the Odin Pro even it couldn’t really emulate 3DS well.
Is that running Windows?
Interesting. I would take games like that as a nice surprise unless there’s some leap Citra has made.
Like I said, it seems be the difference between vanilla and the MMS fork.
And Rune Factory 4 is the game I was looking to replay anyway :p.
DSGamer wrote:Interesting. I would take games like that as a nice surprise unless there’s some leap Citra has made.
Like I said, it seems be the difference between vanilla and the MMS fork.
And Rune Factory 4 is the game I was looking to replay anyway :p.
Nice.
Okay, here’s the reality check:
Samus Returns - 30fps/1X. Needed to tweak settings to get rid of audio glitches.
Pokémon Sun & Moon - Not really playable. Runs between 30fps and 5-15fps with glitchy sound.Hey, it’s a $150 device so I’m still amazed.
DSGamer wrote:I would worry too much about 3DS. My understanding is that there’s not much it can emulate. When I had the Odin Pro even it couldn’t really emulate 3DS well.
Is that running Windows?
The Odin Pro runs Android.
It is apparently possible to cajole the Odin to run the ARM version of Windows 11.
PS2 adventures with the Fat32 limit on Android. So turns out I was butting heads with that Fat32 SD card limit. Googling was a bit not helpful. It was only bring up Fat32 in context of playing on Freeboot for an actual PS2.
AetherSX2 was helpful in saying you can compress or covert to CHD using CHDMAN tool. The tool was an easy drag the iso on the correct iso to CHD and it will automatically convert your isos to CHDs. Save space and skirts that 4 gig limit. Boots right up. Bueno.
More testing. Wild Arms 3 works decently. Still feels like magic.
Retroarch is great, but it does have learning curves, plural. It's not a single emulator, and the different cores mean even things that you'd think would be simple (like where to place bios files) can vary.
Just to rule it out, have you checked the Libreto documentation to double-check the right bios files are being placed in the right folders?
Some cores, like FinalBurn Neo, search multiple places:
https://docs.libretro.com/library/fb...
Others, like Dreamcast, have to go in a specific subdirectory:
https://docs.libretro.com/library/co...
And it varies from core to core.
Just something to check, IMO. I've downloaded a lot of bios packs, and they're never actually complete, because Retroarch can run so many different cores, and inevitably people aren't going to check every single file, or that when extracted they'll be in the exact right locations. Plus, it's possible some of them could be invalid/corrupt. The same can go for ROMs as well. So if you're patching them I could see that involving more trial and error.
Hbi's suggestion to test one system at a time and get it working is sound, because it's easier to read up on the core and isolate whether an issue is core, bios, ROM, or Retroarch specific.
Some cores like FinalBurn Neo are very particular. But others, like PicoDrive, don't really care. I just started Snatcher on the PicoDrive core, after renaming the bin to "blahblah.bin".
If you're getting a "Failed to load content" error for Sega CD, I'd guess the bios file you have might not be valid, or it might be in the wrong place.
For that core, bios_CD_E.bin, bios_CD_J.bin, and bios_CD_U.bin need to be in the system directory. Sticking them in a subfolder (like /system/segacd) or the folder with the ROMs won't work. If you've verified those specific bios files are in the system directory, you may want to try finding a different source for the bios files, just to see if that's the problem.
Retroarch's playlist functionality ("import content") is great if you're downloading complete perfect ROM sets, and frustrating if your ROMs don't match the CRCs from the database files they're using. This used to be a lot more painful, because there was no "manual scan" option. Either your ROMs matched the CRCs or you had to manually construct playlist files yourself in a text editor.
If you have a small number of ROMs you don't have to use playlists at all, you can just manually load the content each time. But otherwise the manual scan is just going to add all files from the directory into the playlist you're creating when you run it, because it's not doing any checking to verify if a file is valid.
For example, if I run a manual scan on my SEGA CD folder, it's going to add both the bin and cue files, so it does kind of make sense extra rando files in the directory or archive could throw it off. That sounds annoying! But there's also settings you can tweak on the manual scan to potentially avoid that in the future. For example, you can specify file extensions to check for, disable/enable scanning recursively, or disable/enable scanning inside archives.
It is apparently possible to cajole the Odin to run the ARM version of Windows 11.
Totally. It’s not the configuration most people will be running Odin, though.
PS2 adventures with the Fat32 limit on Android. So turns out I was butting heads with that Fat32 SD card limit. Googling was a bit not helpful. It was only bring up Fat32 in context of playing on Freeboot for an actual PS2.
I was never consistently able to get PS2 games to load from the SD card on my Odin. Tried reformatting in exFAT and NTFS, copying to the root directory of the card, and various other suggested fixes. No other app has this problem, only AetherSX2. According to the folks on the official Discord, it shouldn't be a problem, and apparently it's NOT a problem for anyone but myself and exactly one other person on the Odin subreddit, but here we are.
The solution I've found is to run PS2 ROMs from internal storage, but ONLY if I transfer them there directly from my PC via USB. If I copy them from the SD card, whatever it is that AetherSX2 doesn't like about it seems to rub off on the files.
It's very impressive that AetherSX2 can run PS2 as well as it can on such low powered hardware, but it's a very finicky piece of software.
Which isn't good actionable advice or anything, just to say you're not alone. (:
JohnKillo wrote:PS2 adventures with the Fat32 limit on Android. So turns out I was butting heads with that Fat32 SD card limit. Googling was a bit not helpful. It was only bring up Fat32 in context of playing on Freeboot for an actual PS2.
I was never consistently able to get PS2 games to load from the SD card on my Odin. Tried reformatting in exFAT and NTFS, copying to the root directory of the card, and various other suggested fixes. No other app has this problem, only AetherSX2. According to the folks on the official Discord, it shouldn't be a problem, and apparently it's NOT a problem for anyone but myself and exactly one other person on the Odin subreddit, but here we are.
The solution I've found is to run PS2 ROMs from internal storage, but ONLY if I transfer them there directly from my PC via USB. If I copy them from the SD card, whatever it is that AetherSX2 doesn't like about it seems to rub off on the files.
It's very impressive that AetherSX2 can run PS2 as well as it can on such low powered hardware, but it's a very finicky piece of software.
Which isn't good actionable advice or anything, just to say you're not alone. (:
What format does your Odin support? The RH505 only likes FAT32. My old LG V20 was okay with both but only if it formatted by the device itself. I understand the horror of having small issues that only effect you.
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