Hi all, Newbie here with a few questions, can you help?

[boothy]

Hi guys, newbie here setting up a raspberry pi 2 board up with retropie and in need of assistance;

My questions and troubles are;

1. I am currently running retropie/emulationstation 3.0/Rc1 and i am trying to get a video splashscreen to load during the boot up of the system. the problem is i followed a guide on youtube by Herb Fergus as it was the most popular and recommended. I was able to follow most of the guide until i reached a file called asplashscreen in the supplumentary folder, this is when i then noticed it was not there and that this was for v2.6. I was then able to find the file in the etc/Init.d/ folder. I made my alterations and continued with the guide only to find my splashscreen did not boot. It does its initial boot then continues to the emulation station loading screen. My file is Mp4 and the file name matches the folder it is placed in, OMX player is downloaded and installed… have i missed something, if so is there a guide for 3.0 as i have searched the forums and cannot find anything?

2. I am trying to set this up and make the most of the emulators included although when i add all my roms to all the emulators i find that my system has a white screen crash.. i believe that is something to do with the amount of emulators showing at one time and how many menu bars are showing, is this a memory issue or is there a simple fix for this or is there a restriction as to how many emulators can be shown on the menu at one time?

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance.

jodie

[Anonymous]

Hi,

have not tried the video splashscreen, can’t help you there.

As for 2:
Yes it is a problem with having quite a lot of roms. In my case it helped to let it idle there for a bit and have its cogs spin. Took a bit more than an hour in my case as I have my complete PSX collection as ISO on the HD.

Might help you there, not sure though.

Aton

[herbfargus]

I think I can help you with the video asplashscreen. I apologise, I need to update the video as some of the paths have changed and I’ve figured a few things out since i first posted it as well that makes setting it up a little easier. I’ve been working with death259 on his PiAssist script and we’re hoping to integrate it that way as its a little easier than manually editing things, but we’re still working on that.

but until then if you’d like to edit it manually, here’s what you do. Ignore the whole old version of omxplayer- I found a workaround to make the new version work without dbus errors.

you need to edit the script here:
/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/splashscreen.sh
and replace all the asplashscreens with splashscreen like the following

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# This file is part of RetroPie.
# 
# (c) Copyright 2012-2015  Florian Müller ()
# 
# See the LICENSE.md file at the top-level directory of this distribution and 
# at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/master/LICENSE.md
#

rp_module_id="splashscreen"
rp_module_desc="Configure Splashscreen"
rp_module_menus="3+"
rp_module_flags="nobin"

function depends_splashscreen() {
    getDepends fbi omxplayer
}

function enable_splashscreen()
{
    clear
    printHeading "Enabling custom splashscreen on boot."

    cp "$scriptdir/scriptmodules/$md_type/$md_id/splashscreen" "/etc/init.d/"
    chmod +x "/etc/init.d/splashscreen"

    find $scriptdir/supplementary/splashscreens/retropie2015-blue/ -type f > /etc/splashscreen.list

    # This command installs the init.d script so it automatically starts on boot
    update-rc.d splashscreen defaults

    # not-so-elegant hack for later re-enabling the splashscreen
    update-rc.d splashscreen enable
}

function disable_splashscreen()
{
    clear
    printHeading "Disabling custom splashscreen on boot."

    update-rc.d splashscreen disable
}

function choose_splashscreen() {
    printHeading "Configuring splashscreen"

    local options
    local ctr

    ctr=0
    pushd $scriptdir/supplementary/splashscreens/ > /dev/null
    options=()
    dirlist=()
    for splashdir in $(find . -type d | sort) ; do
        if [[ $splashdir != "." ]]; then
            options+=($ctr "${splashdir:2}")
            dirlist+=(${splashdir:2})
            ((ctr++))
        fi
    done
    popd > /dev/null
    cmd=(dialog --backtitle "$__backtitle" --menu "Choose splashscreen." 22 76 16)
    choices=$("${cmd[@]}" "${options[@]}" 2>&1 >/dev/tty)
    splashdir=${dirlist[$choices]}
    if [[ -n "$choices" ]]; then
        rm /etc/splashscreen.list
        find $scriptdir/supplementary/splashscreens/$splashdir/ -type f | sort | while read line; do
            echo $line >> /etc/splashscreen.list
        done
        printMsgs "dialog" "Splashscreen set to '$splashdir'."
    fi
}

function configure_splashscreen() {
    cmd=(dialog --backtitle "$__backtitle" --menu "Choose the desired boot behaviour." 22 86 16)
    options=(
        1 "Enable custom splashscreen on boot"
        2 "Disable custom splashscreen on boot"
        3 "Choose splashscreen"
    )
    choices=$("${cmd[@]}" "${options[@]}" 2>&1 >/dev/tty)
    if [[ -n "$choices" ]]; then
        case $choices in
            1)
                enable_splashscreen
                printMsgs "dialog" "Enabled custom splashscreen on boot."
                ;;
            2)
                disable_splashscreen
                printMsgs "dialog" "Disabled custom splashscreen on boot."
                ;;
            3)
                choose_splashscreen
                ;;
        esac
    fi
}

And then you’ll want to change this file:
/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/splashscreen/asplashscreen
and change the filename to splashcreen like the following
/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/splashscreen/splashscreen
and replace the contents with these:

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          splashscreen
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     S
# Default-Stop:
# Short-Description: Show custom splashscreen
# Description:       Show custom splashscreen
### END INIT INFO

do_start () {

    while read splashline; do
        echo Playing splash video or image $splashline
        isMovie=$(echo $splashline | grep -o ".avi\|.mov\|.mp4\|.mkv\|.3gp\|.mpg")
        if [ -z "$isMovie" ]; then
            /usr/bin/fbi -T 2 -once -t 10 -noverbose -a $splashline
            sleep 12
        else
            omxplayer $splashline
        fi
    done </etc/splashscreen.list
    exit 0
}

case "$1" in
  start|"")
    do_start 
    ;;
  restart|reload|force-reload)
    echo "Error: argument '$1' not supported" >&2
    exit 3
    ;;
  stop)
    # No-op
    ;;
  status)
    exit 0
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: asplashscreen [start|stop]" >&2
    exit 3
    ;;
esac

:

Remove the old asplashscreen with sudo rm /etc/init.d/asplashscreen

Then move your video into a folder like on the youtube video and then open up the setup script-

-choose option 3 setup

-Configure splashscreens

-enable splashcreen

-and then choose your new splashscreen (the folder with your video in it.)

sudo reboot

[boothy]

Thank you guys for your speedy responses unfortunately i work two jobs so i wont be able to do this again until saturday evening but until then thanks again. I will let you know how i get on and, Herbfargus your videos are great and very helpful thank you again!

Jodie

Edit, Managed to follow your steps there quickly using winscp, when i finished everything and rebooted all i got was “waiting for dbus to appear” maybe i did something wrong as i was doing it fast.

[boothy]

Hi there anton,

Thanks for your reply. Is this problem something to do with the SD card, if i transferred everything off on to a usb drive and booted from there could i store all the games on there? if not what is the capacity limit of roms before it begins to freeze if you know.

Thanks in advance

Jodie

[herbfargus]

The problem isn’t a matter of SD card capacity rather its a matter of how emulation station is coded/ the raspberry pi lacking sufficient CPU. There’s not a whole lot you can do about the issue other than thinning your ROM collection down. I’m not sure how accessing ROMs externally affects it (either USB or NAS).

[Anonymous]

I agree with herb there. Just checked and I have around 95.000 files for my RetroPie to process. This takes it around 2 minutes to fully start up.
But this is connected through USB.

I side with herb and recommend what I recommended to a friend of mine who wanted to make his one as portable as he could:
1. Take the games you like to play most
2. Search YouTube for ‘Hidden Gems’ or ‘Most Popular’ games, you’ll be surprised what you discover (MetalJesusRocks, Gamster81, GameSack to name a few)
3. The IGN Top 10, 20, 100 or so are also a great way to discover

With all that retrogaming goodness you’ll be busy for quite a while.

[boothy]

Hi again guys, i have followed your guide herb about three times now and still no luck. It seems to be a problem finding the OMXplayer as when i go to configure splashscreen, the first line of text is “Could not find correct packages; OMXplayer, trying to install now? i have tried the guide about three times now and no luck, i have installed omxplayer at the start of the guide and it says that it is installed and up to date. is there something i am doing wrong?

thanks in advance

Jodie

[herbfargus]

Try removing omxplayerin this file

/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/splashscreen.sh

I added it as a dependency but if you’ve installed it manually that file doesn’t need it.

[choccyhobnob]

For point 2.
It’s a memory issue with emulation station. It’s not the number of roms you have, its the number of systems. This came up a while ago and the ES skin author reduced the size of the background images from 1080p to 720p to free up a little more memory but it’s still an issue if you have a lot of systems emulated.

[mikegold]

I have followed Your guide and it worked. Kind of…
1. I have turned off all text on device start all according to your other video.
2. Now when I start my Pi it shows on the bottom that it wasn’t able to load the video (gives the whole path) and after a few seconds the video starts.
3. After video is finished I can see for a while linux info with last login time etc.
So is there any way to switch off all this nasty text?

Thanks in advance ;].

[herbfargus]

Yeah I really need to find a better scripted option than all these manual edits… I’m still working on that. Its weird its giving you an error but still loading the video, and outside of the boot text I talked about in my video I don’t know how to hide the rest of the text.

[mikegold]

I did everything just as in your post on top of this thread. I literally did copy-paste.

I think it might be the picture viewer trying to start the *.mp4 file and after it fails, video player kicks in.

Is there any possible way for the video to run while emulation station is loading?
It would be nice to go from video straight to the list of emulators…

Also I’ve noticed that no matter how long is the movie, after that I’m getting this black screen with last login in linux etc. text and then EmulationStation loading splash, yet I’ve seen on YT some people having video that links seamlessly with ES splash.

[herbfargus]

yeah that may be why- its definitely not the most ideal yet.

yeah change this line here: do_start to do_start &

The only caveat is when emulationstation loads, it loads, so it will cut off your video whenever it loads up.

[mikegold]

After adding & to do_start my video is cut after first few seconds and Emulation Station starts loading. I thought that I will show You the error I’m getting, because that bothers me way more than this Linux text right after movie.

If You know how could I get rid of it, please let me know.

PS. Congratulations on Your 1000 post ;].

[Author]

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