Reply To: [Retropie v3.00 RPi2 Final] EmulationStation freezes with lot of systems (> 10)

[gr33k]

posted on git but reposting here for easy reference:

Sooooooo….raspi-config is appending the memory split after other entries which override it:

#gpu_mem_256=128
#gpu_mem_512=256
#gpu_mem_1024=256

overscan_scale=1
gpu_mem=896
arm_freq=1000
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
over_voltage=2

For me on the B+ it’s the gpu_mem_1024=256 line that was resulting in less memory than I had thought to check (derp) thinking gpu_mem=896 would take priority if set explicitly – it does not…so I commented out the other lines.

960 GPU split is too high it seems and craps out the Pi…had to pull SD card and set config.txt back to 944. This seems to be the limit according to:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt.md
(Mental note to read documentation first then tinker lol..)

Setting to 944 and Pi is dragging along and doesn’t want to fully boot up still (doesn’t seem to be an efficient memory split). Wasn’t patient enough to wait longer, so I set it back to 896 for further testing (again via SDCard reader). This seems to be the highest GPU split that I could do without emulation station not able to boot.

That said – All themes with multiple backgrounds seem to hang at white screen during boot.

Tested es-theme-clean-look, es-theme-paradox, es-theme-tronkyfran works fine after changing to it from colorpi theme, but startup hangs at white screen…best one being tronkyfran which was perfect and had a background for everything.

It seems like Raspi can handle all the backgrounds in some cases, but hangs during boot up specifically. Additionally – it seems to run these emulators and Kodi without running in to memory issues – it seems odd to me that something like background pics would cause a memory limit on a nearly 900MB GPU memory split :(

I also stopped being lazy and counted how many emulators/icons I have on my setup (including retro pie settings, infocom,etc): 32 total.

Is this really a limitation on RasPi you think, or is there something wrong with how themes are loaded up during boot-up? If it loads it fine AFTER colorpi starts up…why can’t it do it at bootup with other themes? If it can handle up to 32 emulators after colorpi starts up first, why can’t it boot up with like say…15 emulators?

Just seems odd! I’m happy to grab any logs or whatever I can do to help :)

Thank you