Hello, I have been (trying) to use snes 9x for a couple days now, running on windows 7 64 bit, and I can not for the life of me get it to open up a game without it crashing. I have tried downloading from different areas, and the interesting thing is that it will open up and run games correctly when still RAR'ed, but once it is extracted it will crash every time I try to load a ROM. Does anybody have any input as to what may be causing this issue? thanks in advance

can you give an example of input files? (not the files themselves, just the full filenames including extension)

also, is snes9x producing an error message? if so, what is that message?

It happens regardless of the file I am trying to load, and no error messages pop. Windows says that the program is no longer responding and closes.

all of the files have been organized to look like gamename(regionletter).smc

Where do you have it extracted? Is it a previous s9x installation dir? Does it make a difference where you extract it to?

You can also try if the latest testbuild behaves differently.

I have all of that stuff in my program files, not that it seems to matter. the only time it works is right after I initially download it and open it up in winrar. after its extracted it becomes dead

snes9x might be crashing due to no write permissions in the rom dir - whereas when run from a rar file, the actual rom dir would be %temp%. (unless run as admin, %programfiles% is read-only).

what happens if you move the rom files to another location (e.g. c:\temp)?


...either way, move your roms (and anything else that's not an app). keeping them in %programfiles% is a bad idea, akin to saving pictures in %windir%.

Tried moving them, does the exact same thing

is there anything else in the rar files besides the rom image?

what's the full path of the location you moved the roms to, and the full path of snes9x?

nuclear option: what happens if you run snes9x as admin? if this works, then your snes9x install should be moved until the windows port is updated to check if it's in %programfiles% and, if so, use %programdata% as its config dir.

the roms arent even rar'd, and I put them in a "My documents" folder (because its where snes9x default looks when I open a new download of it).

Apparently running it as an admin fixes this. I dont really understand what you are saying after checking that though. all of my directories are within the folder that I had specified, and my config file is there also.

by default, applications do NOT have write access in Program Files, even in their own directories. it appears the issue is that snes9x does not handle not having write access for stdout.txt, stderr.txt, and/or snes9x.conf gracefully, leading to a crash.

running as admin explicitly gives snes9x write privileges, preventing the crash. this, however, is a bad idea in general.

i would suggest moving snes9x out of Program Files to another location (like c:\emulators\snes9x) - that should resolve your issue.

aaaah ok. thanks for the explanation, it makes a lot more sense