nilsbyte
commented
10 years ago First of all, a memory split of 512/512 is not good at all, this means the GPU will use the whole RAM and i am sure this isn't possible. Recommended memory split value for RetroPie is 256 (set it with raspi-config). Or was this just a typo? :)
Second, the RetroPie SD images are meant to be used 'as is'. We can't give support to altered versions because we simply can't reproduce it easily. In addition to that, RetroPie is not our piece of work, it's @petrockblog 's.
The cache files you are mentioning are the XMLs for meta data, they store all the information such as paths to ROM, image and description.
I personally prefer to install RetroPie-Setup with git on the base of a clean Raspbian installation, because the SD image has some adjustments i don't like.
Did you problem only occur with N64 or other systems too?
cpw83
InkyPi
Hi,
I (and obviously some other people, see http://blog.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/adding-games-causes-black-screen-after-splash-screen) have a weird problem with ES on RetroPie.
I'm using RetroPie 2.3 (the SD card image) on a RasPi Model B, memory split left at the default 512/512.
When I was first trying RetroPie, I copied some ROMs for some different systems via SMB to the corresponding folders, just to try out the whole thing, this worked fine so far. After that I copied all of my ROMs (BTW: ES exited while copying); here's where the problem first occured:
When launching ES, the screen after the "Loading"-splashscreen stays black, there's only "CHOOSE" in white letters at the bottom left of the screen. It seems Emulationstation is still responding though - you can blindly flick through the menu and start a game, also pressing F4 will exit Emulationstation in what seems to be a clean shutdown. Sometimes (I think when this problem occurs for the first time after copying ROMs) the loading-splashscreen screen flickers like crazy.
After trying this and that I tried to isolate the problem:
First of all I did a fresh reinstall of the RetroPie image on the SD Card. Then I updated Raspbian (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y && sudo rpi-update) and everything emulation-related with the RetroPie-Setup-script, set up the controls (Xbox 360 wireless controller) for Emulationstation and RetroArch, set the audio to HDMI only etc. After that I created an image of the SD card of this working configuration.
Now I copied all of my ROMs in the corresponding folders. When I started ES, the problem occured again: Black screen, only "CHOOSE".
As updating everything obvioulsy didn't help, I was convinced that this problem was caused by some ROM or its filename, e.g. a problem concerning a regular expression of some kind, maybe one that's looking for the file extension or something.
So I put my clean, working image back on the SD card and instead of copying all my ROMs for the different systems at once, I copied them seperately for every system: I quit ES and started with "amiga", started ES again, checked if everything worked, rebooted and made sure everything still worked. Then I quit ES again, went on with "amstradcpc", checked, rebooted and so on.
Finally I thought I found something:
The problem occured after copying some N64 ROMs in the corresponding "n64" folder. Now I deleted them one by one by exiting ES (F4), deleting a single file at a time and restarting ES. The problem persisted until the n64 directory was completely empty. Now every single N64 ROM I copied back in caused the problem.
Now I thought I figured out what was happening:
The problem seemed to be caused either by files themselves or their filename. If you copy such a file into a ROM folder and ES looks for it while starting, something crashes. Furthermore there seemed to be some kind of "cache file" (which I wasn’t able to locate so far) for every ROM folder containing the filenames, which gets damaged/inconsistent/broken in the process. It seemed if the "broken" directory is completely empty, the corresponding broken cache file won't be opened and everything works fine. If you put any file (regardless of its name) in there afterwards, everything will stop working again, because the cache is accessed.
Now I just needed to find out which file caused the error, so I reset everything to my clean SD card image and copied my N64 ROMs one by one, stopping ES before, starting it afterwards and then additionally rebooted after every single file.
And now guess what: The problem didn't occur...
So it's not a specific ROM causing it, but something else, maybe some weird combination of ROMs or their names in different folders. I can't figure out a pattern here. Of course the problem occured again after copying the rest of the ROMs.
I'm pretty much through all the logfiles I could think of (/var/log and ~/home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt), I can't find anything unusual, nothing pointing out any error or warning at all. The only thing worth mentioning might be
lvl1: Error - folder with path ""/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/esconfig"" is not a directory!
but this does also appear if ES is working fine, so it has probably nothing to do with the problem.
I also tried to start emulationstation with the "–-debug"-switch at the shell, hoping this might output more information in the logfile or the shell, but it doesn't.
Any ideas? Any logfiles in other folders I could check?
// EDIT:
I just tried to reproduce the problem on a x86 platform (Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop x64 in VirtualBox, installed ES from the _latest DEB, made a ~/RetroPie/roms directory with all the systems, copied the es_systems.cfg from the RasPi and then all the ROMs at once) - this doesn't glitch out, it works fine.
Additionally I'll try to run the whole thing on "real" x86 hardware without virtualization.