So, I recently got a Retroid Pocket Flip2, but I’ve had a rough go.

I’ve been setting it up for the past week. I’ve had one major problem this whole time.

I’d go into ES-DE, go into NES, go to a game, and boot it up. Aaaaaaand I’d get a black screen with no context. Game wouldn’t load. No error message. Nothing to tell me what I did wrong.

So I go into retroarch directly, and find it works just fine. Huh.

So off to google I go, and I got thrown for a loop, because apperently about 8 months ago there was an actual bug in the nightly releases that was patched a few days later. But that was 8 months ago in the nightly releases, and fixed, AND I only downloaded the stable version 1 week ago. But thats all google was finding.

The other thing I was finding was that this problem happens if you don’t have the proper BIOS files. The problem with that is, the NES doesn’t have BIOS files at all.

Finally I figured out theres a log file. And so I look at the log file, and it says Mensen.so was an invalid or missing file.

No clue what that means.

So as it turns out, ES-DE has preassigned default cores that it expects you to use for each system. Mensen is an NES core emulator, but I had downloaded FCE. And I only downloaded one NES emulator, because I figure it’s the NES. How hard can it possibly be to emulate a 40 year old system on modern hardware, right?

Well, that’s true. But ES-DE is specifically always looking for the default. In this case Mensen. When it didn’t find it, it gave up. Didn’t matter that I had a perfectly stable, and solid core emulator. It just gave up.

So what you do it, go into ES-DE, go to menu. Then Other Settings. Then Alternate Emulators. Then select the one that you want to be the default.

Now restart ES-DE, and load your game. Should work like gravy.

The only other reason you’d get a black screen is if you’re using a system that needs BIOS files, that you never set up.

Hope this helps someone using google in the future! Happy retro!