Blank screen when I load the core

[Thad]

Hi there,

I haven't been able to get the NeoGeo core to boot at all. I have the 128MB SDRAM add-on (in case it helps there's more info on my setup in the thread I posted yesterday).

When I try to boot the core, I get a completely blank screen and no inputs seem to work, including the reset button on the IO board. (The Linux environment is still running; I'm able to ssh into it.)

I suspect this may be an issue with the BIOS, because the same thing happened with the GBA core, and resolved itself when I added a boot.rom file.

Here are the binary files I have in games/NeoGeo and their md5sums:

Code: Select all

fc7599f3f871578fe9a0453662d1c966  000-lo.lo
b11751ad42879c461d64ad2b7b2b0129  neo-epo.sp1
aa2b5d0eae4158ffc0d7d63481c7830b  sfix.sfix
9def9a8a02851afa1a132dfb321359b1  sp-s2.sp1
4f0aeda8d2d145f596826b62d563c4ef  uni-bios.rom

I've also got romsets.xml in the same directory.

Any idea what could be causing this? Am I on the right track in suspecting it's a BIOS issue, or could it be something else? Any help is appreciated.

[darksakul]

It could be your Binary/Bios files.

If it's just the romsets.xml file you can still use the OSD and go though the menu, but you get nothing but folders on your rom directories.
Dumb question, what version Neo Geo Core you are using?

[Thad]

The rbf file is NeoGeo_20200510.rbf. I'm assuming 20200510 is the version? At any rate I just ran update.sh so it should be the latest.

[glenfiay]

you have the AES and MVS bios and even renamed the unibios, there shouldn't be any issues at al

it took me a few moments to get the right 000-lo.lo and sfix.sfix files although I don't know their MD5 value, try again and it should work flawlessly

[Kreeblah]

For what it's worth, I can run the core fine and my files have the same MD5 sums as mentioned earlier except sp-sp2.sp1.

For that, mine is 2968f59f44bf328639aa79391aeeeab4.

[Thad]

It looks like it's the SD card. I tried another one and it works.

Thanks for your help.

[johnpfusco]

I had a similar issue and it was the FTP method I was using to transfer the Roms to the SD card. When I changed the transfer method to binary from auto it resolved the issue. Strangely enough it only happened on NeoGeo Roms.

[kamshaft]

I've experience problems loading if you are using a inline barrel switch. Like this one in particular.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/LED-Strips-In- ... 2749.l2649

It drops the voltage on the unit and some cores just won't load, or sometimes load. Remove that switch if you have one, and voila!

[Threepwood]

I've experience problems loading if you are using a inline barrel switch. Like this one in particular.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/LED-Strips-In- ... 2749.l2649

It drops the voltage on the unit and some cores just won't load, or sometimes load. Remove that switch if you have one, and voila!

Judging by the photo I am using these exact switches and testing them with a multimeter they do not change the voltage at all. Thus I cannot confirm what you say.

I have two MiSTers that are both hooked up to such switches. My power supplies are a Mean Well GST60A05-P1J (5V, 6A) for a MiSTer with USB-Hub-Board and an Anker 5V, 7.2A 4-Port USB power supply that has 2.4A max. per port for a MiSTer with an external, separately powered USB hub.

[Thad]

I had a similar issue and it was the FTP method I was using to transfer the Roms to the SD card. When I changed the transfer method to binary from auto it resolved the issue. Strangely enough it only happened on NeoGeo Roms.

I suspect there was some filesystem corruption caused somewhere in the chain of microSD card -> SD card adapter -> card reader -> USB -> Linux's dodgy FUSE-based support for exFAT (hopefully soon to be a thing of the past, with exFAT now supported directly in the kernel). I had the issue with both NeoGeo and MegaCD, so the longer, larger filecopies may have been part of the problem.

I set up a new card, and this time I copied everything over via SFTP. No issues with the new card so far; Neo Geo and MegaCD both working great (though MegaCD still has the refresh rate problem I mentioned in another thread).

[monkie]

I had a similar issue and it was the FTP method I was using to transfer the Roms to the SD card. When I changed the transfer method to binary from auto it resolved the issue. Strangely enough it only happened on NeoGeo Roms.

Just wanted to say thanks for this, solved my problem too.

[ash2fpga]

I had a similar issue and it was the FTP method I was using to transfer the Roms to the SD card. When I changed the transfer method to binary from auto it resolved the issue. Strangely enough it only happened on NeoGeo Roms.

This is probably due to the default FTP client settings and behavior with regards to transfer mode.

FTP clients "traditionally" [at least the earliest client I used in the 1990s] supported an "automatic" mode that would switch between ASCII/binary (likely for handling EOL differences between platforms).

FileZilla, for example, keeps "with tradition" of defaulting to "automatic". It uses file extension matching to determine if a file is ASCII or binary. For files without extensions, FileZilla has an option "Treat files without extension as ASCII file". All the neogeo game rom files [from the recommended pack] have no extension. It is likely that there are other FTP clients that behave similarly. FileZilla wiki page: https://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Data_Type

WinSCP, for counterexample, defaults to binary for all files. With it, you have to "opt-in" to any automatic transfer mode behavior.

[Felix_Gaunt]

I am also having this issue, well in my case it just ends up showing 320x224 and 1920x1080 in upper left corner, but yeah then nothing, no Neo Geo logo, just blank screen. I tried transferring via binary with no luck. :-/

[Louthrax]

If that can help, I had the same problem (black screen after loading a NeoGeo game), and solved that by just moving my NeoGeo ROMs from my network folder to the MiSTer SD card (with exactly the same contents). Seems like either the NeoGeo core is sensitive to storage access times when loading a game, or that there are some interactions with the network accesses ?

[darksakul]

If that can help, I had the same problem (black screen after loading a NeoGeo game), and solved that by just moving my NeoGeo ROMs from my network folder to the MiSTer SD card (with exactly the same contents). Seems like either the NeoGeo core is sensitive to storage access times when loading a game, or that there are some interactions with the network accesses ?

Actually the Game folder names when not on the Mister SD card is case sensitive.

[Louthrax]

Actually the Game folder names when not on the Mister SD card is case sensitive.

Thanks darksakul, but I think there's something else, because I can see the different files beeing loaded from the network folder, including the usually biggest crom0 which takes a few seconds. It ends with loading vroma0. The screen then blinks quickly (like if the NeoGeo core was reseting), but
stays on black.

Has anybody succeed in loading NeoGeo roms from network ? I was planning to have all my roms/saves/config on the network, and only the required files on the SD card, plus the core files (as the cifs mounting takes some seconds after boot). Not a big issue anyway, as I said, everything works fine if I put my NeoGeo roms on the SD card.

I'm using the DarkSoft rom set. I also tried putting the NEOGEO folder at root level and inside the games directory. BTW, what is the correct casing supposed to be ? Seems to be "NEOGEO" ?

[jca]

...
I'm using the DarkSoft rom set. I also tried putting the NEOGEO folder at root level and inside the games directory. BTW, what is the correct casing supposed to be ? Seems to be "NEOGEO" ?

Correct, if you want to know the exact name to use for the games directory of a specific core start the core, press F12 and look on the left of the popup, the exact name to use is the name on the white background.