I'm having some trouble setting up Retroarch on a new Windows 10 PC. At first, I had no sound whatsoever (and yes I had audio enabled and mute audio disabled). Then I changed from xaudio to daudio, and audio started working in games, but the menu is still silent/muted, despite me having enabled menu audio. Which isn't a huge deal, but was annoying while troubleshooting.
The BSNES mercury and PPSSPP cores are working fine. I only have one Wii game available, and that causes the Dolphin core to CTD. I tried three different Saturn games with the Saturn Beetle core. One loads to an "empty drive" message on the config screen, one loads to a "2 tracks" message on the config screen, and one causes a CTD. All three PSX games I've tried cause CTDs for both PSX Beetle and PSX Beetle HW, and that's after trying two different sets of BIOS files. And yes, I put them in the system folder. I've spent over an hour on Google trying to solve these problems, but a lot of the documentation I'm finding is out of date/contradictory. Can anyone point me in the right direction on maybe what file formats (iso?/bin?/img?) are most likely to work or not work with these cores, or exactly which BIOS files I need and what they need to be named? I'll edit my post if I'm even going over the line mentioning BIOS files, but I own a PSX, two PS2s, two PS3s, and two PSPs, so it's not like I can't legally play PSX games.
I always thought PCSX2 was obnoxious and fiddly to get working, but it seems idiot-proof compared to this....
Someone earlier had similar issues with PS1 emulation in this thread so I'm gonna quote my reply here for easier viewing:
I've lately been using Retroarch with the Beetle PSX core (Mednafen's name for the libretro fork), haven't had any performance problems so far. Once you run Retroarch, from the main menu choose Online Updater -> Core Updater and choose PlayStation (Beetle PSX). Retroarch will download and upack the core. You'll also need PS1 BIOS binaries which you should put in the "system" folder inside Retroarch's root folder. I've actually had some problems with this recently as Retroarch wouldn't load certain PS1 games until I realized that it was only the European games (just loaded into a black screen), so it seems the Beetle PSX core is a bit picky about which BIOS versions it wants. They also need to be named "SCPH5500.bin", "SCPH5501.bin" and "SCPH5502.bin", those being the JP, USA and EU versions respectively. I believe the actual BIOS versions that worked on Beetle PSX for me are listed here, near the bottom of the page under "Alternative BIOS files", namely the ps-30j, ps-30a and ps30e (versions 3.0). Won't post any links but you should be able to find some with the info in this post.
The Saturn images I have are all in bin/cue format but some of them won't load (Retroarch doesn't crash, just refuses to load or recognize) but I haven't really looked into it. The PS1 images I have are also all in bin/cue format but I don't have any problems anymore after I've started using the appropriate BIOS versions.
Hope this helps.