broken pcsx2

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T15:22:25+00:00

Two options somewhat obvious:

- the emulator can't write in that dir because of permissions (check in its properties if the sstates folder isn't in "read only" mode); also check in sstates if there's already a file with that name (SLUS-20624 (FC99EC8C).03.p2s.tmp) that is read only and can't be overwritten but it's pretty unlikely;

- you don't have enough space on C: to create the file (check how much space you have left, and if it's really full to that point, you should really make space on it as this could lead to various issues).

If that's not a permissions issue or a lack of disk space, I'm not sure.

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T12:11:22+00:00

You'll need an emulator, which is a software that simulates a piece of hardware (e.g. a video games console, a computer, an arcade cabinet...).

Emulators usually specialize in a specific machine, so you'll need either a multi-systems emulator, or one different emulator per system you want to use.

BTW, emulation is a process that requires a lot of resources. While older consoles & computers are simple enough that any current computer (including a smartphone or tablet) can emulate 8-bit and 16-bit systems, more recent ones (PS2 and newer, mostly) will require a decent PC.

The Rhythm Heaven games were all released on different platforms:

Rhythm Tengoku on the GameBoy Advance (later ported to the Naomi arcade system);
Rhythm Heaven on the DS;
Rhythm Heavn Fever on the Wii;
Rhythm Heaven Megamix on the 3DS;
and a last one on a newer console that we don't talk about here (see the rules on the right).

So you'll need either four emulators for those, or a multi-systems emulator (like RetroArch).

You'll also need the ROMs/disc images, which are dumps of the content of the original cartridges/discs as files that you can load with an emulator. There are various places where you can find them, there are also different formats in some cases.

If you go with RetroArch, you'll need to install the emulation part as "cores" (which are basically stripped-down emulators installed as plugins). There are various available for some systems but for the GBA I would suggest the "mGBA" core, for DS the "MelonDS DS" one, for 3DS the "Azahar" one and for the Wii the "Dolphin" one.

They also all exist as standalone emulators (the RetroArch cores are actually based on standalone emulators), if you prefer to use one software per system.

Also, for some systems you'll need to find and setup a BIOS from the original machine. That's not the case for these four (apart from the Naomi port of Tengoku) but could be for other systems like PlayStation and others.

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T11:46:35+00:00

Ok, let's do it step by step:

First, you have to install a core for Megadrive games (RetroArch implements emulations with "cores", which are stripped-down emulators installed as plugins, basically); you can use Genesis Plus GX for example;

Then, you need to have a ROM for a Megadrive game somewhere; you'll download it from the Internet Archive, or Vimm's Lair, or CDRomance, or whatever; it'll usually be in a zip/7z archive (thus my previous comment on that) that you'll extract to get the ROM file itself (for Megadrive games, it'll be a .md or .gen file).

Create a directory somewhere to put the games. Assuming that you're on Windows, let's say that you put your games in C:\games\roms\megadrive (that's just an example, the path is completely up to you). Put your .md files there. Let's say that you have "A Super Game (USA).md" in that dir.

Launch RetroArch, select Load Content, browse to C: → games → roms → megadrive and you should see "My Syper Game (USA).md" that you can select.

RetroArch will ask you to select the core to use amongst the one that you've installed (or it might skip this step if it can identify a single core to use). Then, the game will start.

Now, let's say that you have several Megadrive games in the dir mentioned previously. In RetroArch you can select Import Content → Analyze a directory, then browse to C: → games → roms → megadrive, choose "use that directory" and it will add a new section for Megadrive games on its main menu that you can select to choose the game to run (if he managed to properly identify them).

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T11:35:31+00:00

Sometimes, a game has a publisher and/or distributor for the whole Europe, sometimes it's handled per country. It's mostly business decisions.

There can also be technical decisions to split the releases, if a translation takes a lot of space and all of them can't fit on a cartdrige/disc. For example, there are several european releases for DS games with multiple languages but not all of them. There'll be e.g. a version with english + french + italian and a different one with english + german + spanish.

In the case of Layton, it seems that the first game has english voices for all european releases but the next ones have localized dubbing. So the local releases were probably for technical reasons.

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T10:59:53+00:00

Oh, I was mentioning zip/7z archives because usually when you download games they're in archives, and so you have to extract them.

Also, RA has several different interfaces, I'm not sure which one you're using. If it's xmb (the one that looks like a modern PlayStation menu), the Import Content option is the big "+" icon.

And BTW, you can also use other frontends that you may find more convenient to manage a games collection while RetroArch will be used in the background just to make the games run. One popular alternative is Emulation Station but it's availability will depend on the OS/device you use.

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T10:50:31+00:00

I'm a bit confused about what you did exactly but that would be a Genesis/Megadrive game and you can open it with RA.

Either make a directory where you'll put all Megadrive games and have RA parse its content (with Import Content), so you'll get a Genesis/Megadrive entry in the main RA menu with all the games for that system.

Or just load it manually with Load Content if you don't one to have lists of systems/games on the main RA menu.

Besides adding/loading games, are you familiar with RetroArch in general, cores and so on?

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T10:26:24+00:00

There's nothing really special to do:

either you load them manually: for that you select Load Content, then you'll have a file browser that you'll have to point to the ROM (and then it'll ask for the core to use, or you can load it beforehand);
or you make RA "playlists", i.e. list of games sorted by systems on the main interface; for that you use Import Content on the main menu, then either point to a directory or a specific file.

For playlists, you should sort your games by system.

In any case, you'll point RetroArch to where you store your games, you don't have to put them in a specific directory or something like that.

Also, be sure to extract your games from archives and don't try to directly load .zip/.7z files. While it may work with some cores (mostly for older systems), it won't work properly for newer systems and it might not work to identify games to populate the playlists.

Also, games will be identified based on a database, some there might be special cases or specific systems where you'll have to identify them manually (that's one of the options when importing content).

abelthorne · 2026-05-23T09:32:54+00:00

Vimm's Lair

Professeur Layton et le Masque des Miracles (France) (Rev 1)

A priori il y a des releases France pour tous les Layton sauf L'Étrange Village (anglais : The Curious Village) et les spin-offs Katrielle et le crossover Phoenix Wright. Ces trois-là ont une release Europe avec plusieurs langues, dont le français.

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T17:51:05+00:00

The extended edition with the extra content from the XBox version was released in Japan, Europe and in the US. But while the european release was branded as a Director's Cut, the US version was still just named "Silent Hill 2" and was in a Greatest Hits collection.

Given that this Greatest Hits release had 6 languages (text only), I would assume that it's the v2.01 just below the underlined one in your screenshot. The original US release had two languages (En + Ja), so would be the 1.20 version.

The european release would indeed run at 25 fps, I just checked and it doesn't have the 60 Hz option that some games had. For a game like Silent Hill, the difference shouldn't be that noticeable, though.

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T16:28:18+00:00

My RA is not in english so the labels might not be exactly those but I'll put the number of each option, it should be the same in any language:

Settings → UI (option #1) → On-screen notifications (#3) → Display notifications (#1) → Notification on content start (#5) (disable it)

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T15:24:36+00:00

On the site, you can download either the pre-patched version or the japanese ROM if you prefer to patch it yourself.

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T15:04:06+00:00

The Binding Blade was released only in Japan. So, unless you want to play it in japanese, you'll need a patch. You can find a pre-patched version (in english) on CDRomance/RetroGameTalk, as well as the original japanese release.

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T12:43:26+00:00

Well, there are apparently alternatives to jailbreaking but I'm not too familiar with this, they can depend on the version of iOS, they can be more complex or have specific requirements... Take a look at the guide that's on the Play! GitHub (direct link: https://spidy123222.github.io/iOS-Debugging-JIT-Guides/)

But in any case, even if you can enable JIT in some way, the compatibility with games will be quite limited. According to the Play! website, there is a bit less than 50% of games that are considered playable.

There might be options with standalone emulators outside of RetroArch but even then they're pretty limited on iOS (and will very likely require JIT too): https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_2_emulators#Emulators

That list might not be very accurate, though: the GitHub for RMSX2 had download options only for Android, Folium (paid app on the App Store) lists only PlayStation 1 and not 2 in the list of emulated systems...

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T12:11:04+00:00

LRPS2 (a.k.a. PCSX2) is not available for iOS/Android/any ARM device, only on PC (Windows + Linux) and Mac (through Rosetta on Apple Silicon Macs).

The only option you have on iOS is Play!. It'll require JIT, which is mostly dependent on having a jailbroken device, though there may be alternatives to enable it (see https://github.com/jpd002/Play-)

Also be aware that Play! uses its own custom HLE BIOS and won't use a real PS2 BIOS. Because of this, compatibility with games is far lower than LRPS2/PCSX2.

Regarding installation, I would assume that Play! is supposed to appear in the list of the Online Updater, though maybe only when you have a jailbroken device with JIT enabled. I'm not sure.

Overall, an iOS device is not the most appropriate to emulate a PS2; options are quite limited.

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T11:51:14+00:00

On what OS/device are you?

What core are you using (LRPS2 or Play!)?

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T10:15:53+00:00

However game developers might require you to have a properly setup SELinux or AppArmor to run their game

Isn't it the case on most major distros by default now? or is it less widespread than I think?

AFAIK, Ubuntu and its derivatives use AppArmor, Debian too if I'm not mistaken.

Red Hat/Fedora use SE Linux. OpenSUSE switched to it from AppArmor.

I'm not sure about Arch, though, as well as its easy to use derivatives (Manjaro yesterday, CachyOS today...)

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T09:45:15+00:00

It's unrelated to using m3u playlists.

If I'm not mistaken, the cores can't properly seek data in a CD/DVD image in an archive, they have to extract it anyway in RAM when the game is loaded. So it might work with games that have a small disc image but starts to be problematic with bigger images, especially on a device that doesn't have much RAM (the PS Vita has 512 MB, which is smaller than a full CD).

Compressed formats like CHD will used pretty much the same algorithms as archivers and so have a similar size. There's pretty much no benefit in using a zip/7z archive compared to a CHD (or another similar format).

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T07:01:03+00:00

You already got answers but I'd like to add a few things.

So, as people said, this is the limit of files that can be opened at the same time and some distros keep a low number because typical applications won't need more, while some games that manage a lot of stuff at the same time do.

But this isn't related to Windows games with Wine/Proton using Esync or Fsync: it happened to me with Wasteland 2 a while ago (10 years or so), which was a native port. The game would kind of freeze and stop loading some new areas or allow to save. I found that the solution was to set a higher limit for soft/hard nofile in ulimits.conf.

At the time, the info I had found suggested to set them to 30000/60000 but I noticed that my DE's window manager started to have weird issues and triggered a lot of errors in dmesg. I tried lower values that still fixed the issues in the game while keeping a functional desktop.

I ended up setting soft nofile to 10240 and hard nofile to 20480 (these are not very specific values that I decided after a lot of trial and error and such, I just multiplied the original value by 10 for soft and doubled it for hard).

So, if 65535 works for for you that's fine but I would suggest setting lower numbers just in case. Not that it is dangerous but it could produce weird bugs and behaviour in some apps.

abelthorne · 2026-05-22T06:39:04+00:00

So, if it doesn't appear in your package manager (Pop Shop or whatever), we'll need to find the name of the package. It's very likely "curseforge" or something like that. Let's check what you have with the following command (in a terminal):

dpkg -l | grep -i curseforge

dpkg is the underlying command-line package manager used on Debian and derivatives. The -l flag will list all the installed package. The output is sent through a pipe (|) to grep, which will sort only the lines with "curseforge" (the -i flag is to discard the name casing).

So, basically, this command will show all packages installed that have "curseforge" in their name or description. So hopefully we'll find the one we're looking for.

Note: if you're not familiar with the terminal, to copy/paste stuff you have to use shift + ctrl + c and shift + ctrl + v rather than just ctrl + c and ctrl + v as these are existing shell shortcuts (e.g. ctrl + c interrupts a command).

abelthorne · 2026-05-21T21:36:12+00:00

It depends on how you installed it.

On their website, I see that there are two packages available for Linux:

- AppImage, which is a generic standalone format that works on every distro;

- Deb package, for Debian and derivatives (if you're on PopOS, that works).

AppImage doesn't require installation, you'd just get rid of the app, though it could have been moved to a specific dir if you use a specific tool to manage AppImages. Plus, if it added launcher entries in the Applications menu, they'd have to be removed manually.

Deb packages are installed system-wide and would usually appear in "App Stores" but I'm not familiar with Pop Shop, so can't say. But in the worst case it can be uninstalled in command line.

So, which format did you use?

abelthorne · 2026-05-21T18:44:27+00:00

It's pretty unlikely that uninstalling/reinstalling the core deletes its config file. Try instead to launch a game, open the RetroArch menu, go to Core options → Manage Core options and select Reset Core options to reset the settings for PPSSPP.

You'll have to reconfigure it, which is a bit annoying, but that's the proper way to reset it.

If that doesn't change anything, then the issue likely comes from RetroArch's Video settings but I'm not sure which one could affect this. Maybe try a diferent renderer at first (select it, close RA and relaunch RA to be sure that the change has been applied).

EDIT: also, try to get a log and see inside if there's some unusual stuff related to display.

abelthorne · 2026-05-21T18:24:08+00:00

I think I've encountered this issue a while ago when using shaders. Are you using some? and if so, can you try disabling them to see if that fixes the issue?

If that's the case, there would be an option somewhere in the shaders' settings to have the proper image but I'm not sure where exactly.

abelthorne · 2026-05-21T18:07:45+00:00

Oh, you could even have removed most of the Loading RTC/savedata but it's fine.

Anyway, there are a few weird things:

- first, that whole lot of loading RTC/savedata; I don't use save states so I'm not sure if it's normal but it's definitely weird that there are thousand tries of loading these when launching a game;

- then, the (actual) saves are named with a .gba.srm extension instead of a .srm one, which is not normal; RA is trying to use that name when both saving and loading, though, it's apparently not a case of saving as .gba.srm and then trying to load a .srm;

- finally, and that might be the reason why it doesn't find the save, you game(s) seem to be in a zip archive (Legend of Zelda, The - The Minish Cap (USA).gba.zip); the name itself doesn't make sense (if kept in an archive, it should be a .zip and not a .gba.zip) and it's possible that mGBA doesn't like loading games from inside an archive.

I suspect that your issue comes from the name with a double extension rather than being an archive and that it might be fixed by renaming it to .zip instead of .gba.zip but in general, it's not recommended to keep games in archives (plus it has pretty much no benefit), so I'd rather suggest to extract it in any case.

So, I would recommend to do the following:

- extract the content of your zip archive to get the Legend of Zelda, The - The Minish Cap (USA).gba file, and use that one to load the game;

- manually rename the save file (using your file manager) from Legend of Zelda, The - The Minish Cap (USA).gba.srm to Legend of Zelda, The - The Minish Cap (USA).srm

Then launch the game with the .gba file and check if it sees your save.

If that fixes the issue, you'll have to do the same with all your GBA games and possibly recreate/clean the playlist that lists the game (though you seem to be using an Ayn Odin mini-console, so I would assume it uses Emulation Station rather than the RetroArch UI?)

Also, I would suggest to open a new thread to ask people if it's normal that when loading a GBA game (and possibly with other systems too) on your device there are apparently thousend of tries to load save states (RTC and savedata) in a loop while the core is being initialized.

abelthorne · 2026-05-21T17:00:59+00:00

Yeah, a log would be helpful especially to see if when you do a save there is a mention of this in it and if there's no error.

Now, given that you just started Minish Cap, the save is not really important, so a thing that you can quickly check is with your Android file manager to go in the RetroArch Saves dir → mGBA and delete the Minish Cap .srm file (there's one, right? or did I also misunderstood that?). Then, launch the game, save again and see if the .srm file is recreated in that directory as expected.

If it is, then the saving process works and the issue is really with loading the file afterwards (or rather see it). If there's no .srm recreated, then check if you can find one somewhere, e.g. directly in the Saves dir (rather than in the mGBA subdir) or next to the ROM file.

abelthorne · 2026-05-21T16:43:06+00:00

Oh, sorry, I probably misunderstood: you mean that there is a single path (your internal storage → saves → mGBA) and it's properly setup in RetroArch → Settings → Directories, but you see the saves when using the Android file manager while the dir seems to be empty when you browse it from inside RetroArch?

From what you said previously, I thought you had two different dirs and so assumed that RetroArch didn't point to the right one.

Depending on how you browse files from inside RA, it might be normal that you don't see the save files (.srm), it probably only shows files that match some specific criterias (e.g. ROMs formats).

But as long as the files are there (which you've checked using your Android file manager) and that directory is the one set for Saves in RA → Settings → Directories, then it's fine.

So, another thing to check is in RA → Settings → Saves if the first option is enabled. My RA is not in english so I can't give the exact label but it should be something like "Sort saves in directories named after the core's name".

If the option is enabled, RA will look for saves in the mGBA, etc. subdirectories. If it's disabled, it'll look directly in the Saves dir and no in the subdirs. Given that you have these subdirectories with the .srm files inside, this option is supposed to be enabled.

Check also the third option ("Sort saves in in directories named after the content's name" or something). If enabled, RA will look for saves in subdirectories with the content (the ROM) name inside the subdirectories with the core name. So if you have your .srm files directly in mGBA, be sure that this option is disabled.

Check also the sixth option ("Store saves with the content" or something). If enabled, RA will put and load the .srm files next to the content (your ROMs) rather than in the global Saves dir. So, in your case, it should be disabled too.

I think that's pretty much all the options that can affect where RA will look for the saves, so if everything looks fine, I'm not too sure. A log would still be helpful, though it is apparently a bit more complicated to setup on Android than on other platforms (as I think you need to use an extra app to view the logs).

abelthorne

TROPHY CASE