@alphabetapie said in Question About my Backup Images:

instead of just imaging the used portion of RetroPie (which is only a few hundred megabytes)

how are you calculating this? a retropie installation should be several gigs.

it has to create an entire 64gig ISO on my desktop of all that empty space. Since I need multiple backups, this is going to take up a lot of room on my HDD for nothing.

https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink

Do I have to always image the entire SD card, even if unused, to ensure I get a 1:1 copy that will seamlessly be restored when I use a program like Etcher to burn the image to a new SD card later?

it depends what you're changing - you could backup the individual configuration files you've changed.

Also, if I were to give this image to others to burn to a fresh SD card, does the gig size have to match perfectly? Meaning, what if I have a 64gig image and they try to burn it to a 256gig SD card?

the image has to be less than or equal to the size of the new card. you can expand the file system to consume any extra space on the card (pishrunk-images will do this automatically)

@saccublenda said in [[Solved] Pixelated and juddery background layer in > > I can use the hotkeys to browse and control the retroarch RGUI, but I cannot press the start button to start this game.

Try changing the controller type from DualShock to standard.

Thx - I managed to fix this problem with the multitap emulation option - I made an edit/update below: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/248454

OK, so I was able to solve it; a couple of steps I think were necessary, the others I did as precautions.

Basically, the main issue was that my runcommand-onstart.sh and runcommand-onend.sh files were empty; these need lines to trigger xboxdrvstart.sh, which in turn should allow the GPI controls to be recognised by Mame4All. Here's what I did:

In /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh I added the following:

#!/bin/sh

source /opt/retropie/configs/all/xboxdrvstart.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
sudo pkill -STOP mpg123 > /dev/null 2>&1
fbset -g 320 240 640 480 16

In /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onend.sh I added the following:

#!/bin/sh

source /opt/retropie/configs/all/xboxdrvend.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
sudo pkill -CONT mpg123 > /dev/null 2>&1
fbset -g 320 240 320 240 8
fbset -g 320 240 320 240 32

(the lines about mpg123 are, I think, related to background music or something like that; probably not needed, but I borrowed these from a pre-made GPI image so thought safer just to copy everything.)

Then, after a restart/reboot, I switched the GPi's D-Pad to axis mode by by pressing START+DPAD LEFT for 5 seconds, until the purple light flashed.

I deleted default.cfg in /opt/retropie/configs/mame-mame4all/cfg

Finally, I the went to GPI's 'Controls Updater Menu' and ran that script, just in case.

@mitu said in I Need to Go BIG For My Next Build:

@alphabetapie said in I Need to Go BIG For My Next Build:

[FAILED] failed to start usbmount@dev-sda.service

The error is benign and can be ignored. /dev/sda is the whole disc device, so it cannot be processed (since it has not filesystem). The partition you created is on /dev/sda1 (1st partition on disc) and it works fine, as you already noticed.

Thanks a lot for confirming! Much appreciated.

@sgrontflix I think that the latest updates to the emulator conflict with old configs. I ran into the same problem, no matter the setting, the controller configs were wonky across all games. I had to remove all the custom settings and redownload the emulator to get default configs for it to be consistent again. I think that it has to do with moving the controller type from settings to controllers and the added mutitap menu. 🤷‍♂️

@brandflake11
I tried doing my initial plan of mounting the drive in fstab, but it didn't work either. I think What I'm going to have to do is like you suggested, using softlinks but pointing to a /external/ folder inside the rom/system folder. I did some testing last night, where I had symlinked the folder and had a few roms inside. I also have a gamelist.xml file and a /media folder where all the videos for ALL the games exist. Using the subfolder, I can see all the roms that are "internal" and a separate entry called external, when clicked on opens up all the games that are on the external drive. When I un-mount the drive and reopen ES, the "internal" roms are still there but the "external" entry is gone. This works by configuring ES to have the setting Always Parse Gamelist to NO, that causes it to scan for the files at launch. If set to YES, it will list all the games whether they exist or not. The nice thing is that ES will scan the roms and find some games with the drive disconnected and will still load the appropriate media (I think it loads them from the gamelist.xml in this case, where it sorta soft-loads the xml but isn't restricted to it). The only problem I have now is that the games loaded in the external folder (when it exists) it doesn't load the media. I think this is because it's still going to try to load the gamelist.xml and the paths no longer match. I'll just need to rescrape. That's what I'm going to try to do tonight.

So yeah, using a symlink like this works:

ln -s /media/retropie/Passport/roms/amigacd32 /home/pi/RETROPIE/roms/amigacd32/external

You just have to live with having the external games be listed in a EXTERNAL folder in your browsing lists. When I tried to do it on the file-level, it still tried to load and display all the linked files in the gamelist.

@barbudreadmon Thanks! I had put the cheats in the wrong folder.

Oh, there was a weird report on our discord saying that retropie only had .44 available some time ago (i told the guy to write a report here), so the issue was only about the build script description being outdated ?

PS : between new supported games and redumps, there should be around 2 dozens of romsets that changed since 1.0.0.0

@mitu

That seems to have sorted it! Thank you!

When I stared out I first visited the retropie docs
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/PC/#install-gravis-ultrasound-gus

Which redirected me to this guide from 2015, that suggest using .sh scripts.
Now that everything is working I'll start converting everything over to just using conf-files, and optimizing the games :)

@iandaemon It was a typo, thanks for noticing.

As far as I know, using both displays requires X to run, but RetroPie doesn't use the desktop environment to run.

I've "solved" by keeping "pi" as login user and disabling password when doing sudo
thanks

@leon21
You can find old versions of Retropie here - https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/releases

To be honest, I would try a different version of the rom and see if that works rather than downgrading Retropie.

@retro81 Actually I may make it ask the user to update from RetroPie-Setup, to keep updating handled in one place.

It probably needs a driver - see https://github.com/medusalix/xow for such a driver.

@colombia20102018 said in Video paths not showing on Emulationstation:

I would think there is a way to paste all the video paths to all games at once. Am I wrong? Thanks

No idea what happened on your mame-libretro folder, looks like the gamelist is correct, so I don't understand why it's now showing the artwork in EmulationStation. You can check if the paths referenced in the gamelist.xml file are correct (i.e. the video/image files are present on-disk), maybe they are missing (but you said they're present, so probably not).

You could use something like FSArchiver to backup the individual /boot and / partitions (excluding ROMS). dd could be used for individual partitions, from a separate Linux system (/ shouldn't be active when dd is run). FSArchiver is included in the live boot System Rescue image, you can use it to restore/backup from a separate PC, without installing Linux on your PC.