What is going on?!

Last week ALL of my games arbitrarily stopped working.  I finally gave up and deleted and reinstalled RPCS3 (deleting all my saved games), loaded up a fresh boot of Infamous and STILL nothing.  This is bizzare.

Not sure if this is related, but I just did a fresh format and install of my OS and I just went to RPCS3 homepage and windows and linux builds (I use Win 11) are unavailable for download. Never seen this before.
(Note to self, always backup last working emulator installer before format).

But maybe something is going on and they have suspended downloads till they work it out? This seems plausible to me after reading your post.

I seem to have fixed the problem. I have all my games organized into separate folders. RPCS3 decided it didn't like that. Resistance worked because it was the only game I didn't have in its own separate folder. I tried moving the files for Infamous onto the desktop, and as soon as I did it booted up. I'm not sure how I'm going to organize my games now, but at least everything seems to be working again.

Hmmmm. I have my PS3 games on an external drive (E Drive), Samsung T7 2TB SSD, I have it named simply "PS3", and every single game has its own folder. Disc based games I mean. With HDD games, I just install to the default RPCS3 folder, which is at (well it will be when the latest versions becomes available for download again) C:\Emulation\RPCS3.

To be honest I have never had any issue with this setup, unless of course the game is not properly compatible.
So I am not sure what you mean by separate folders, as all disc games SHOULD be in separate folders, as they share multiple common file names.

I know. Maybe *not* keeping Resistance in a separate folder broke RPCS3? I don't know. It's genuinely bizarre.

I know.  Maybe *not* keeping Resistance in a separate folder broke RPCS3?  I don't know.  It's genuinely bizarre.

That makes sense now, got it.

Yes, that would cause issues. Major ones.

Cause the root folder of all PS3 games is identical and even some audio files and things will be named the same between games within the deeper game sub folders, even though are they are totally different things for different games.

This is how all your games should be:

Individual folder with game name. As soon as you open that folder there should be a PS3_DISC file
and then a PS3_Game Folder. This should exist as the first thing that appears for all your individual games folders when you open them i.e at the root of the individual game folders.

Good to know. That's how I *had* my games organized until Resistance arbitrarily decided to dump itself in my Downloads folder. For now I've got most of my games separated off into various folders (Documents, Music, Movies, even one on just sitting on the Desktop) and they're booting again. That'll have to do until I figure out how to really fix the problem.

The downloads were not working because we're changing CI for builds and it's not fully working with Azure yet.
There's no issue with the commits themselves.

Good to know.  That's how I *had* my games organized until Resistance arbitrarily decided to dump itself in my Downloads folder.  For now I've got most of my games separated off into various folders (Documents, Music, Movies, even one on just sitting on the Desktop) and they're booting again.  That'll have to do until I figure out how to really fix the problem.

You can have them spread over multiple drives, that's no issue for RPCS3.

For example I used to have a PS3 folder on my C drive and then on my D drive, with individual game folders in each as described above, until I went and bought an external drive to be able to clear my system drives and put all my games onto one drive.

A friend of mine has his games across 3 drives and again no problems.

You just have to add games in the RPCS3 top left menu and point it to your main games folder on each drive.

Not sure if this is related, but I just did a fresh format and install of my OS and I just went to RPCS3 homepage and windows and linux builds (I use Win 11) are unavailable for download. Never seen this before.
(Note to self, always backup last working emulator installer before format).

But maybe something is going on and they have suspended downloads till they work it out? This seems plausible to me after reading your post.

late to reply but just confirming this did work for me. i just did this earlier today. i had the same issue as OP. all games working, then after trying to install and run my copy of wolfenstein a few days ago everything but one game worked. every other game loaded into black screen all of a sudden.

i redownloaded / deployed Rpcs3 after i cleared all caches / folders, added games but had no luck. same blackscreen no matter how many previous builds i tried. A repeated error i seemed to get was "unexpected Param.SFO found in directory" or something like that which leads me to suspect it was something to do with the file system or the directory. i also had to setup an exclusion to ignore the emulator and my games folder directory in my firewall as it was restricting access at one point. not sure if that's helpful to this or not.

after some prepping i decided it was best to re-organise the file list. worked first time. every game. including the game that seemed to break it all.