Megadrive rom is freezing

[morario84]

RetroPie newbie here. Got everything all set up and for the most part everything works great. Only problem is one of my sega roms is freezing. I’ve been playing Shining Force for the genesis and I’m 2-3 hours into the game and every time I enter the town Manarina in chapter 2, the whole system freezes up. Sound comes to a halt with a little skip sound, screen goes black and everything becomes unresponsive. Can’t escape out of the rom, need to do a hard reset by plugging/unplugging the Pi. I’m using the latest image from the downloads page here: https://www.petrockblock.com/retropie/retropie-downloads/download-category/retropie-project/ (i’m at work right now, so I don’t have the exact version number but that’s where I got it from).

I’ve tried overclocking and changing the memory split, but neither helped me. I have plenty of room on my SD card too. Is this as simple as a shitty rom? I haven’t had any other freezes, just on this particular game at the same spot every time (have played other games for a few hours with no issues).

[Roo]

It’s more likely a problem with that emulator. Try copying the rom to /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/megadrive-dgen and run it with the other Genesis emulator to see if the same bug happens.

[morario84]

Thanks man. Like I said, total newb to this whole thing, how do I pick which emulator I use? When I load up emulation station, I just scroll over until it says Genesis and go from there.

Also, since this bug is ~3 hours into the game, can I copy my save and try it with the other emulator? If so, what’s the easiest way to do that?

The simplest way I can think of is navigating through folders after using startx and copying/pasting.

[Roo]

The easiest way is just to copy that one ROM to the other folder. For example If you have one ROM in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/megadrive-dgen and 50 ROMs in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/megadrive, you’ll see two “Genesis” options in EmulationStation but one will have just the one game, the other will have all 50.

I’m not sure, but I would bet the save systems between the two emulators are not compatible. But if they are, then yes, you would copy the save file to the correct folder where the other emulator is configured to look for save files. I’m not in front of my Pi, I don’t know the folder locations off the top of my head.

[morario84]

Thanks. I’ll try that tonight.

Are certain emulators generally more compatible than others, or is it hit or miss depending on different roms?

[Roo]

As a general rule in RetroPie, the “default” emulators perform better. So the general consensus is the /megadrive folder emulator works better than the /megadrive-dgen emulator. But both are included because no one emulator is best for every ROM. All emulators have their bugs.

You may be the only person to have found this particular bug, since it happens 3 hours in :)

[Author]

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