ES not responding after leaving a game

[sleepylight]

When I first boot my Retro pie it pulls up emulation station nicely, and I can select a game and play it through. If I hit ESC to drop out of a game and back to ES, I don’t get keyboard or joystick control back.

Is anyone else having this problem? I’m working from the stock SD card image.

-Max

[Anonymous]

I am also having this problem. It doesn’t happen every time, but maybe 25% of the time I quit a game, I am faced with the SDL layer (the white dot) and all functionality shuts down. Network connections don’t work, so I can’t even reset the Pi through SSH. This seems to be a persistent problem for me, so I have had to keep periodic backup images to avoid data loss from pulling the plug.

[Cairn McDonald]

I am having this same problem. It seems to happen after I’ve been playing for a long time, so it’s frustrating to have the game not save.

[Mjothnir]

Getting the same problem here. I posted about it yesterday but I may as well post here too. It usually only happens if I have been playing for more than approximately 45 minutes.
I would suggest to those having this problem that as a temporary fix for your save files go into retroarch.cfg and find the line
autosave_interval =
and put in the interval that you would like the game to save (in seconds). This saves all “non-volatile” data in the SRAM which includes save files but perhaps not save states (mine haven’t saved, but I may have configured them incorrectly).
Of course this doesn’t stop ES freezing or the need to unsafely powering off your pi. I hope a fix for this can be found soon.

Mjothnir

[Anonymous]

In my own case, I’ve found that setting a hotkey to make a save state works just fine as long as you save before attempting to exit the game. Regular save points don’t seem to work well (the kind that actually come with the game), but as far as I know, cutting the power doesn’t seem to affect my save states.

[jplaj]

Hi. I’m having the same issue–the screen goes black (with the white dot) when I exit the emulators. Happens more often when I’ve been playing longer, and my .srm files don’t seem to update at all unless I exit the emulator completely back to Emulationstation.

I’m going to try the autosave suggestion as a temporary fix. Sorry I don’t have anything useful to add, but I wanted to get in on the thread for the updates in case anyone can solve this problem.

[Cairn McDonald]

I tried the autosave, which seemed to work, but now my save file has been reset. God knows why.

[Author]

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