White screen on boot with simple-dark theme

[smartroad]

So I brought this up on the github and thought it solved but it isn’t.

Backstory:
I had a working 3.4 system (installed from the 3.4 image) and upgraded it to 3.5 via the script and installed binaries, as per the github wiki. When I rebooted the system loaded the splashscreen and then ES logo loading screen and then I ended up with a white screen, and the system was unresponsive. I could SSH in however.

So on Github it was suggested that I set the theme manually to carbon as it seemed like a memory issue, weird as it worked with those settings before I upgraded. I SSH’d in, changed es_settings.cfg to the carbon theme and rebooted, voila ES loaded fine. I then switched the theme back to simple-dark, reloaded ES (as it didn’t load a couple of images in properly a problem I have whenever I change a theme regardless of which one), considered the problem closed and played a few games.

Today I started the machine up and was presented with the white screen of death again. So I repeated the above, set to carbon, reboot, worked, set to simple-dark, reboot, white screen. ES seems to have suddenly become incapable of loading simple-dark when booting – but will load it when set in ES and restarting ES only.

I am using a Pi2, 256MB GFX split. I don’t get why when the machine boots it whitescreens with simple-dark but if I change from carbon to simple-dark and restart only ES the theme loads. Not to mention this all worked fine before I upgraded with the same GFX split.

Confused!!

[petrockblog]

please post the output of ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt after you have a whitescreen

please post the contents of /boot/config.txt

can use pastebin.com for the logs.

[Anonymous]

Not sure if this is helpful at all, but I’ve noticed that sometimes I will get “white screens” when choosing a new theme from inside ES, but then it will boot/load fine after quitting out of ES.

[Omnija]

White screens can happen for multiple reasons.

– need to refresh ES for new theme
– gpu split needs to be higher due to too many emulators
– gpu split needs to be higher theme is heavy in graphics

i think there might be another but those 3 are pretty common.

[labelwhore]

You can squeeze in more emulators and/or game art by shrinking the images. Of course this means they’ll be lower quality, but it works.

Using the pixel theme helps too as it re-uses a lot of resources, like the background image, for example. The logos are really tiny too. Being that it’s a pixel art based theme, the low res gameart do to shrinking isn’t as off-putting as it may otherwise be.

I have 55 emulators on my pi without a white screen, most of them with at least some game art, the main ones completely scraped.

[smartroad]

[quote=116761]please post the output of ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt after you have a whitescreen

please post the contents of /boot/config.txt

can use pastebin.com for the logs.

[/quote]

es_log: http://pastebin.com/dwixWSyj

config.txt: http://pastebin.com/RZUz6Tbn

[smartroad]

[quote=116762]Not sure if this is helpful at all, but I’ve noticed that sometimes I will get “white screens” when choosing a new theme from inside ES, but then it will boot/load fine after quitting out of ES.

[/quote]

This happens after I have manually editied ES settings to carbon and then in ES switch to simple-dark, I have to restart ES. That is the weird part, it is fine doing that, just not when I do a total reboot.

Even when previously (different install to this one) I switched to a theme that was nothing but white, the ES menus still popped up and worked. When I boot it is just a white screen and totally unresponsive to any input via gamepad or keyboard. The only way to get it doing anything is the SSH in and there I can edit, reboot etc.

[smartroad]

[quote=116763]White screens can happen for multiple reasons.

– need to refresh ES for new theme
– gpu split needs to be higher due to too many emulators
– gpu split needs to be higher theme is heavy in graphics

i think there might be another but those 3 are pretty common.

[/quote]

The key thing for me is that before updating to 3.5 (from a 3.4 install) I had no problems loading this with the number of emulators I have. simple-dark would load from boot with no issues. And I can get simple-dark to load after I have manually changed things.

If the issue was the GPU memory not being enough I should never have been able to get it to work. Me confused! lol

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