RetroPie white screens during loadup with certain roms installed

[jassinlive]

Hello

I am still very new with the RetroPie game and have come into an issue. Whenever I try to install roms for specific emulators (MAME, Gameboy Advance, N64) the RetroPie boots into a white screen. As soon as I remove these roms and reboot the Pi it loads fine.

I am successfully running roms on a handful of emulators including the GBC, NES, SNES, Ataris 2600, Genesis and Megadrive. My sixasis controller also loads and plays fine over bluetooth.

Is there an obvious step I may have overlooked? Is this a common issue? I cannot find anything with whitescreen.

Cheers

Sam

[binne]

I also had such problem with roms on specific emulators.

Hmm i think this problem was gone after change the permissions of the emulators.

At the moment i dont have access to my raspi, but im looking later for that.

It has to be something like this :

chown -R pi /path/to/the/emulators

Hope it helps

Cheers

[jassinlive]

Thank you for the reply. Changing the permissions on the emulators did not fix this issue =(

[trimmtrabb]

Could be not enough video ram, which model Pi do you have?

[retchron]

Im having the same issue. I have some nes, snes and n64 on there now. But when I try to add anything else it white screens on load. As soon as I delete those files it boots up just fine. I have expanded the filesystem, that was my first thought too though. It says I have 11G available.

[flickcorp]

I get somewhat the same error half of the gui shows and it’s frozen can still putty into it and reboot but nothing this happens when I load SEGA genesis games as well as some others onto the card don’t seem to have any issues with Nintendo games

[jassinlive]

It sounds like a few of us are experiencing the same issue. I am running a model B Pi with 512mb RAM. I followed this exact guide while setting up the Pi:

Updated for 2.3: Step-by-Step Guide

This includes the memory split to 384.Could that be the cause?

Cheers for the replies

[flickcorp]

Not the cause doing the same on a model b pi 512mb and have used the same tutorial and used both default memory split and the 384 even changed the root permissions and still to no avail I am wondering if SD cards could be the cause or lack of power still not sure. I have even overclocked..

[flickcorp]

Going to rebuild from scratch using the in depth method found on this page https://www.petrockblock.com/2012/07/22/retropie-setup-an-initialization-script-for-retroarch-on-the-raspberry-pi/ will update with results..

[jassinlive]

Yeah let me know. I wanted to avoid the 16+ hour manual install but will if it is the only way to play PSX games. Cheers

[phillipjfry]

I’m having the same thing, emulationstation boots up with a white screen after the ES splash screen. At first I thought it was because I kept building from source, then I started just updating my SD card using binaries only, testing with a reboot each time.

I’ve been running into this issue repeatedly since I started using RetroPie at 2.1. SOMETHING happens during my configuration/copying each time. So far overclocking, changing the overscan to disable and updating the binaries have not been the issue.

The last few things I changed during this current attempt was I added some roms from backup (that were originally on the retropie) over ssh/scp, changed the locale/keyboard/timezone, moved over some backup files to .emulationstation/downloaded_images and .emulationstation/gamelists files.

I’m going to either back out some of my changes or start over and see if I can configure everything and not put anything new into roms or BIOS folders. I’ll update later if I’m even posting correctly.

[jassinlive]

Cheers man.

[flickcorp]

I was able to get my genesis roms working like they should by switching my extensions to .gen instead of .bin

[jassinlive]

Yeah man. Genesis worked out of the box for me

[trimmtrabb]

What power supplies are you using? Anything under 1A will cause problems

[trimmtrabb]

Which model Pi are you guys using by the way B or B+?

[phillipjfry]

I don’t know what power supply I’m using. It’s an amazon 7 port powered USB hub with the rPI plugged into one of the two high powered usb ports on the front
www amazon com / AmazonBasics-Port-USB-power-adapter/dp/B00DQFGJR4

Here’s what I did last night:
Fresh install, first boot, changed locale to US UTF 8 as default (kept original starred), rebooted, ES runs correctly

Second boot, changed timezone to US/Eastern, rebooted, ES runs correctly

Third boot, changed keyboard to Generic 104-key pc, Other, English (US), English (US), default keyboard layout, no compose key, No terminate x server, rebooted, ES runs correctly

Fourth boot, overclocked to Medium, rebooted, ES runs correctly

Fifth boot, copied backup roms over to retropie via filezilla to roms directory, ES runs correctly, reboot, ES runs correctly

Sixth boot, disabled overscan (removes black bars), reboot, overscan disabled correctly (no black bars on bottom), ES runs correctly

Seventh boot, scraped some images using gamesdb (archive seems to give most issues, no images and segfaults emulationstation, also why doesn’t pac man and ms pac man scraping ever work? never finds results), played some games, lost track of time and figured out there’s more testing to be done

Eighth boot, overclock to high, reboot, ES runs correctly, running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, reboot, ES runs correctly

Ninth boot, updated raspi-config, changed memsplit to 384 (was 256 default), black screen. Instead of white screen. I am sure that I have two of the 512mem models.
Kill -9 ES via ssh, updated retropie-setup script to the latest version, reboot.

Tenth boot, white screen, kill ES via ssh, update binaries in retropie-setup.sh (first option).

The thing is, I’ve had 384 as the memsplit before but then SOMETHING changes then it reboots to ES having a white screen.
I can’t help but feel like the locales are causing this issue, either changing them or not removing the old one or ES is having an issue because it’s not using the old UK locale

Eleventh boot, updating binaries reset memsplit back to 256, ES runs correctly

Twelvth boot, changing memsplit back to 384, ES becomes white screen, kill -9 via ssh, running sudo ./retropie-setup.sh, SETUP, ES-Config

Thirteenth boot, ES runs to white screen after running ES-Config in 12th step

Next step is to run all the steps above again after reflashing the SD card with the original 2.3 image and NOT changing the locale or keyboard setting

I have the weekend to perform a couple of server upgrades but I’ll squeeze in some time to try some other weird combinations to see if we can haev 384 memsplit and ES run correctly

[trimmtrabb]

I don’t think the gpu needs any more than 256 memory, the most demanding emulators (Playstation and N64) don’t need any more than 128 and ES requires 256. There’s a thread over at Raspberrypi.org that may be of interest: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=80674

[jassinlive]

I’ll try changing the memory to 256. Cheers for the tips

[m4rcos]

I have the same problem. When I put a Mame rom the ES freezes at the startup.

Any solution?

[retchron]

Thought I mention that my issues have since been resolved. However, I did so many things I’m not sure which one worked. I changed my overclock settings, expanded the root memory size, and reset my pw.
I think it sounds like a memory issue, since some of us are getting some systems to work that others aren’t. Even if you’ve already done it, expand the root memory again just in case.

sent via Tapatalk

[motorhead]

Same issue here! I’m using 256mb for GPU, but I need to add some more, ES starts bugging text and missing pictures with certain number of systems enabled.

PD: Scraper can’t find words with 3 letters or less, I have all scumm games scrapped except “THE DIG”

[jassinlive]

I will try the memory fix. I have also purchased a new 5v 3A usb power supply as a precaution (was using 5v1A before).

[Anonymous]

This issue happened to me last night after adding Genesis and PSX roms. It worked fine with the NES and SNES roms I already had installed. I fixed it by changing the memory split to 256. I had it at 384 before.

If you don’t have SSH configured you can get to the command line by hitting F4 on the emulation station splash screen (right before it white screens). If you make it to the white screen you will have to restart and try hitting F4 earlier. I could not get mine to exit to command line after it white screened.

Anyway, after that I ran config (sudo raspi-config) and changed the memory split back to 256. It worked fine at that point.

[bobbyt]

If what I read elsewhere is correct, this is actually a memory issue.

The problem is more Rome and systems, the more memory needed by emulationstation (as it effectively hods everything in memory).

Also, if what I read is correct, updating to the newest version should help, as it’s taken the background images and compressed them better…

I ran into the same problem at one point, but ended up fixing it by pulling the N64 rooms (since theyre not playable anyway). I actually tried to find the blurry background images at one point to compress them myself but never found them…

[bobbyt]

[quote=81861]If what I read elsewhere is correct, this is actually a memory issue.
The problem is more Rome and systems, the more memory needed by emulationstation (as it effectively hods everything in memory).
Also, if what I read is correct, updating to the newest version should help, as it’s taken the background images and compressed them better…
I ran into the same problem at one point, but ended up fixing it by pulling the N64 rooms (since theyre not playable anyway). I actually tried to find the blurry background images at one point to compress them myself but never found them…
[/quote]

It appears the info may be (at least partially) wrong.

I tried adding a single rom for a new system and my white background for SNES came back. I then managed to track down the folder with the background images (/etc/emulationstation/themes) and proceeded to compress all of them to about 1/3 their original size…

After restarting my PI the blank white screen came back… So the size of the background images doesn’t seem to have an effect on this problem…

[ceuse]

Bump

After Migrating to a Rpi2 and Setting up a new REtropie 2.6 built i still experience the issue. Everything works fine as long as i keep it 12 active emulators shown or less (same as i had with rpi B). At first i Removed Ports and Added N64 and everything was working. as soon as i added ports back the issue occured again. After clearing a diffrent rom folder (atari2600 since i hardly ever played them/ will play again) everything was working fine again.

I would say with the Rpi2 (and overclock setting set to Pi2) Memory should defently be out of question here.
something seems to be wrong with ES.

[oklakegoer]

Same issue here on Raspberry Pi 2 with retropie 3 beta 2. On my system I have issues whenever I turned on the atari800/atarist emulators. If I rename them so emulationstation doesn’t find them everything is great, but if I include those two folders, I get a white screen on startup. The only way I’m able to reboot/access system is ssh remotely and reboot. I’ve tried turning on logging/etc same issue. I just rebuilt emulationstation from the latest git clone to no avail. Not sure whats going on, any ideas appreciated.

Update – renaming the themes so emulationstation uses a generic themes seems to have helped a bit, but still getting the occasional lockup.

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