I've been playing around for over a week now, and I have had no luck whatsoever in getting any operating system to boot onto my Pi Zero. I started by flashing an image of RetroPie, but that gave me different results every time I powered on. The most consistent error I got was that it hung at a start job attempting to set up console font and keymap. When it isn't doing that it tends to get so far into the boot process and then cascade into garbled text and then shows a pile of random characters while the light stops blinking and the keyboard won't respond.
I've now tried multiple new SD cards, two different keyboards, a selection of power supplies, and multiple operating systems. I attempted to just get Noobs or Raspbian going, but they have similar issues. I ordered a new micro-usb port adapter in hopes that maybe it's causing my problems, but it seems thin.
Any ideas? Is it possible I did something to break my Zero? There seems to be a lot of null pointer errors in the garbled text, is this a RAM thing?
RetroPie image: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/releases/download/3.8.1/retropie-v3.8.1-rpi1_zero.img.gz
EDIT: I did get Raspbian to boot once all the way to the config screen, but after a reboot command it re-started and then crashed to garbled text. Success seemed like a fluke in this case.