Black screen on install and other issues...

[thirtyfour]

Lurker, etc. I've done a lot of reading of the threads lately, including following several of the install guides directly but am still having some issues that seem to fall outside the scope. Not sure what is going on.

• PS2 is a slim, 77001.
• Memory card is a stock Sony, one of the translucent ones, 10020 (not sure if this matters, given how far I've gotten)
• Action Replay MAX. I assume it's the EVO version, as it has the media player and came with the USB key, which leads in to...
• I've tried several USB keys with limited success, but eventually found the one the ARMAX came with, which seems to be working fine, except...

I'm getting a black screen at any point after running FREE_MCBOOT.ELF via the media player. The oddity is though, I am unable to attempt any of the other install methods (using the SwapMagic coder ELF or the FCEUltra.elf), because for reasons I cannot figure out, those other ELF files aren't being picked up by the media player. I can scroll through every other ELF file on the drive -- FREE_MCBOOT along with the others I have nested within the INSTALL folder.

Hoping to avoid having to bug one of the regs here by mailing a card out, given that my primary issue before was finding a USB key that worked. And now that I have the actual one it came with I was hoping it'd just sort of, you know, be magical. No dice yet!

Any suggestions?

[dlanor]

I'm getting a black screen at any point after running FREE_MCBOOT.ELF via the media player.

I have never seen any success stories of people trying to launch the FMCB installer directly that way. Most likely the ARMax launch method is not fully compatible with normal homebrew methods.

All success stories I've seen describe using some other elf to do it, and then launch the FMCB installer from that elf.

A common goal is to launch uLaunchELF (aka: uLE) since that has the ability of launching elfs on any media, thus allowing it to launch the FMCB installer package from USB.

Another popular way is to use FCEUltra, since this contains a primitive relative of the uLE FileBrowser, which can be used to configure the 'ELF Path' that FCEUltra will use when given the 'Exit to ELF' command. Since this ELF launching is also closely related to that of uLE, this too will be compatible with the FMCB installer.

The oddity is though, I am unable to attempt any of the other install methods (using the SwapMagic coder ELF or the FCEUltra.elf), because for reasons I cannot figure out, those other ELF files aren't being picked up by the media player. I can scroll through every other ELF file on the drive -- FREE_MCBOOT along with the others I have nested within the INSTALL folder.

I've heard of this kind of problem before, but I'm not sure what causes them. It may be a good idea to try with several different versions of the same kind of elf, such as different releases of FCEUltra, and having both compressed and uncompressed variants of the same elf on that USB stick.

Who knows ? It may even help to have duplicate copies of exactly the same elfs, but using different names. Since we don't know what it is that causes the browser in the media player to miss a file, we also don't know what might or might not cause it to notice such a previously missed file, so any changes at all might be good here. And it won't cost much to try, except for some effort in copying and renaming.

Hoping to avoid having to bug one of the regs here by mailing a card out, given that my primary issue before was finding a USB key that worked. And now that I have the actual one it came with I was hoping it'd just sort of, you know, be magical. No dice yet!

Just what I said above, about trying more elfs of different versions, different compressions and different names. I'm sure you can find some combination that works since others have done so before you.

Best regards: dlanor

[thirtyfour]

Thanks for the suggestions! Will give it a swing this next weekend hopefully when I've got time to do more trial and error.