Intermittent white boxes for art?

FarrisGoldstein

I'm running on my first pi zero + tft (pigrrl zero) and I'm encountering an issue I haven't seen on any other system before. Sometimes the art just becomes white boxes, both the game box art and the system art in the background. If I start a game and exit, sometimes the art will display again properly. Sometimes it's just one system, sometimes it's all of them. Has anyone encountered this before?

pjft

@farrisgoldstein that's your system running out of video memory. What's the ES version you're on, what's your VRAM setting in ES, what's the memory split on your zero and what's the resolution of your scraped images?

I take it you're using an official image from here?

FarrisGoldstein

@pjft said in Intermittent white boxes for art?:

What's the ES version you're on, what's your VRAM setting in ES, what's the memory split on your zero and what's the resolution of your scraped images

It's a modified official image, yes. FWIW, I ran an in-place update via retropie_setup.sh last night, and so far it seems like these issues are gone. For reference though:

ES: Version 2.7.5rp, built Feb 27 2018 - 17:35:47

ES VRAM limit: 100Mb

gpu_mem=44

The scraped images all appear to be around 300x268 for short box art and 397x660 for taller ones. I realize that's bigger than my screen res, so there's some scaling going on. However, like I said, after an update everything seems to be OK for now, so should I bother re-scraping or modifying the existing scrapes?

BuZz

@farrisgoldstein your gpu_mem is too low. it should be 128MB minimum really. Please post your whole /boot/config.txt though as there are other gpu_mem configs that can override it. (please use markdown to make it a code block on the forum).

pjft

@farrisgoldstein also change the VRAM to 80 after setting the memory split. Or even lower, adjust as needed.

Also, please don't really use modified images. It's impossible for us to really help you effectively if we can't be sure of what's installed and how it's been configured.

Not to mention that those images are terrible for the project's reputation.

FarrisGoldstein

@pjft

I set gpu_mem to 44 based on some Adafruit docs, but that appears to be some snowballed misinformation based on older pis with less mem. However, I've just realized that I also have gpu_mem_512=256, so that is the actual effective gpu_mem. I suspect that got updated when I did I updated all the packages, since the date on my /boot/config.txt is from last night when I updated. That also explains why this odd behavior is gone now.

I appreciate what you mean about images and reputation, but this image is one I made based on the official image. A completely-stock image would require a lot of custom changes up front just to get things working. That's not something I want to do manually each time I build one of these. The only major modifications to them are for the custom inputs required and the tft, and the rest are just minor changes. Granted, what I said above about snowballed misinformation is part of what you're saying, but I'm not distributing these images, just using them as backups and starting points for clones.

Anyway, I think this is mostly solved, but here's my full config.txt, in case you want to gently point out anything else dumb I'm doing. Thanks for the help.

# For more options and information see
# http://rpf.io/configtxtreadme
# Some settings may impact device functionality. See link above for details

# uncomment if you get no picture on HDMI for a default "safe" mode
#hdmi_safe=1

# uncomment this if your display has a black border of unused pixels visible
# and your display can output without overscan
disable_overscan=1

# uncomment the following to adjust overscan. Use positive numbers if console
# goes off screen, and negative if there is too much border
#overscan_left=16
#overscan_right=16
#overscan_top=16
#overscan_bottom=16

# uncomment to force a console size. By default it will be display's size minus
# overscan.
#framebuffer_width=1280
#framebuffer_height=720

# uncomment if hdmi display is not detected and composite is being output
hdmi_force_hotplug=1

# uncomment to force a specific HDMI mode (this will force VGA)
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=87

# uncomment to force a HDMI mode rather than DVI. This can make audio work in
# DMT (computer monitor) modes
#hdmi_drive=2

# uncomment to increase signal to HDMI, if you have interference, blanking, or
# no display
#config_hdmi_boost=4

# uncomment for composite PAL
#sdtv_mode=2

#uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.
#arm_freq=800

# Uncomment some or all of these to enable the optional hardware interfaces
#dtparam=i2c_arm=on
dtparam=i2s=on
dtparam=spi=on

# Uncomment this to enable the lirc-rpi module
#dtoverlay=lirc-rpi

# Additional overlays and parameters are documented /boot/overlays/README

# Enable audio (loads snd_bcm2835)
#dtparam=audio=on
#gpu_mem=44
disable_audio_dither=1
overscan_scale=1
gpu_mem_256=128
gpu_mem_512=256
gpu_mem_1024=256
dtoverlay=pitft22,rotate=270,speed=60000000,fps=40
display_rotate=2
hdmi_cvt=320 240 60 1 0 0 0
arm_freq=1000
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=450
over_voltage=6
dtoverlay=hifiberry-dac
dtoverlay=i2s-mmap

SpudsMcToole

@farrisgoldstein I find when that happens it's because the image is too big. Make it a bit smaller and it's all fine.