Troubleshooting

Frequently Asked Questions¶

Please check the list of frequently asked questions.

Black Screen / Failed Load / Dirty Disc¶

• Check your disc backup and verify that your backup is correct.
• Some games are susceptible to cache problems. Try clearing your cache, or simply try with a blank HDD image.

Enabling Surround Sound in your EEPROM¶

• Surround Sound isn't supported in xemu yet, you should disable this in your EEPROM if you have enabled it.

Flatpak release will not load the Hard Drive¶

As explained in the readme: Only $HOME/.var/app/app.xemu.xemu/data/xemu/xemu can be written by xemu. The Hard Disk image has to be placed there, for example, at $HOME/.var/app/app.xemu.xemu/data/xemu/xemu/xbox_hdd.qcow2. To enable write permissions for the xbox_hdd.qcow2 hard drive file located outside xemu's flatpak system directory, you must grant xemu access to write in an alternative directory. This can be accomplished using either flatpak or flatseal.

Note: This step is not necessary for other system files, such as the BIOS or the MCPX ROM.

Flatpak¶

1. sudo flatpak override app.xemu.xemu --filesystem="$HOME/savedgames/xemu/

Note: Using the same command non-root with the flatpak --user parameter will not work.

Flatseal¶

1. Install Flatseal
2. Select app.xemu.xemu
3. In the Filesystem section, allow access to the folders your BIOS / MCPX / Hard Drive Image are in

Windows Compatibility Issues¶

Windows 11¶

Crash on startup after configuration: On Windows 11 Insider 23H2, there is an issue with Control Flow Guard being mistakenly enabled. See issue description and workaround filed here.

Windows 7¶

That said, xemu has been run on Windows 7 in the past. If you simply must run xemu on Windows 7, here are some tips that may help you:

api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll: If you get a message for this missing DLL, see the workaround filed here.

Windows Performance Considerations¶

Powersave vs Performance Power Management Profile¶

Ensure your computer is using a Performance power management profile. If you are using a laptop, connect your AC adapter to prevent throttling.

Background Processes¶

Ensure any background processes are not consuming your system resources by checking the system task manager.

Integrated vs Discrete GPU¶

In some systems you may have both integrated and discrete GPUs. By default, xemu will request the high-performance discrete GPU. However, system configuration and your graphics driver ultimately decide which GPU xemu is initialized with.

In Windows, you can specify which GPU should be used for a particular application by navigating to Display settings→Graphics settings.

You can confirm which GPU xemu is actually using by looking at the "xemu.log" file.

Nvidia Settings¶

It is recommended to disable "Multi-threaded Optimizations" in the nVidia Control Panel. This feature has been known to negatively impact xemu performance.

Linux Performance Considerations¶

CPU Performance Scaling¶

You may want to check that your CPU scaling governor is set to performance. In a terminal enter the following command to see current governor state:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

If you see powersave printed, you may wish to switch to the performance profile. To select the performance profile:

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Switchroot¶

If you are running switchroot Linux on your Nintendo Switch, you can install xemu from the PPA as described in in the Download page. However, when running xemu you may see the following error:

dbus[12047]: arguments to dbus_message_new_method_call() were incorrect, assertion "path != NULL" failed in file ../../../dbus/dbus-message.c line 1362.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.

  D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace

To fix this you can build and install SDL from source:

sudo apt install cmake build-essential
git clone https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL && cd SDL
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Then launch xemu LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib xemu