maybe a fresh set of eyes - booting Retroarch cores in AM+

[glimmertwins]

I'm going crazy trying to get retroarch set up with AM+.  I feel like I am super close but there is something that eludes me and I've been looking at this long enough that I think it might be useful to have another set of eyes to tell me where I'm being stupid.

Current situation - I have AM+ working well for MAME and NES games on my Mac.  I added retroarch to try to use it's snes9x core for SNES games(after spending a week trying to get snes9x for mac running from the command line and realizing it doesnt support that on Mac......). 

So far so good - I was able to run SNES games from the Retroarch UI without incident.  Then I started to have problems with running it via the emulator settings in AM.  I went back to basics and made sure I could construct an appropriate command in Terminal and after a little playing around I was successfully able to boot games through retroarch from the command line.  Once I navigated to the executable directory in terminal ($HOME/Desktop/emulators/retroarch.app/Contents/MacOS/), this is what worked:

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./Retroarch -v -L $HOME/Library/"Application Support"/RetroArch/cores/snes9x_libretro.dylib "$HOME/Desktop/ROMcollections/TOP100SNESGAMES/Alien 3 (USA).sfc"
I'm feeling pretty good at this point because I know the emulator config files in AM are just using this as a template to build the same command.  I then pop this into my SNES.cfg file:

Code: [Select]

executable           $HOME/Desktop/emulators/retroarch.app/Contents/MacOS/RetroArch
args                    -v -L $HOME/Library/"Application Support"/RetroArch/cores/snes9x_libretro.dylib "[RomFileName]"
rompath              $HOME/Desktop/ROMcollections/TOP100SNESGAMES
romext               .sfc;.smc;.fig;.zip;.rar;.7z
system               Super Nintendo (SNES)

At this point I'm having no success - something starts to launch and immediately closes out - can't tell if it's retroarch or terminal but something is opening & closing very quickly.  Other things I have tried - I see a romlist that has been generated for SNES and I've also been able to favorite some of the SNES roms in the menu so I have both an SNES.txt and SNES.tag file in the hidden location $HOME/.attract/romlists/.  Is there a way to capture via logs what is happening here through AM+?  I think maybe its trying to run retroarch and some setting is causing it to close but it's odd that AM is just building a command through a known working command. 

Any ideas to help me troubleshoot?  Thank you for your support!!!

[glimmertwins]

FWIW, I did manage to get this working.  For future people with similar issues, I ended up getting desperate and plugged my config and logs into ChatGPT and it figured out the issue - misplaced quotation marks.

This was the config that worked for me:

Code: [Select]

executable           $HOME/Desktop/emulators/retroarch.app/Contents/MacOS/Retroarch
args                 -v --fullscreen -L "$HOME/Library/Application Support/RetroArch/cores/snes9x_libretro.dylib" "[romfilename]"
rompath              $HOME/Desktop/ROMcollections/TOP100SNESGAMES/
romext               .sfc
system               Super Nintendo (SNES)
....only differences was found in the quotation marks.  After that I had a problem with the Retroarch screen losing focus which was then solved with the "--fullscreen" addition to my arguments.  Running beautifully now!