EmulationStation Kiosk-USB Specific Crash - Can it be Replicated?

hooperre

@mitu To be honest, I only use Kiosk when copying my SD for my cousin and brother so I'm not sure pre vs. post update.

The crash message is the "Emulationstation has crashed" blue screen. Suggests I reset rom permissions / check gpu split. I can post a picture later if you're not sure what I'm referring to from memory.

Is there another character I can use to bring the collections to the top besides a space? I can test that when I'm back from work.

mitu

@hooperre said in EmulationStation Kiosk-USB Specific Crash - Can it be Replicated?:

The crash message is the "Emulationstation has crashed" blue screen. Suggests I reset rom permissions / check gpu split. I can post a picture later if you're not sure what I'm referring to from memory.

Aha, I know that message. It happens when ES crashes, but the actual crash might behind that message (in the terminal screen). Is there such message ?

EDIT:

Is there another character I can use to bring the collections to the top besides a space? I can test that when I'm back from work.

Try using _ or !.

hooperre

@mitu How would I get underneath the message? I've tried Ctrl+C but it seems that the keyboard doesn't work. I know there is an exit or back option, but there's no way for me to select it because it seems like all the inputs don't work at that point. Can I SSH in and somehow see it there? exit?

mitu

@hooperre Maybe Esc or Enter ?

hooperre

@mitu I’m fairly certain I’ve tried both as I have a keyboard with it currently. No other way to see that error?

hooperre

@mitu Confirmed. Basically freezes the system. No inputs work.

mitu

@hooperre Try to login to the system via SSG and run killall dialog when the message is on-screen. I forgot about this option.

hooperre

@mitu I basically just see the error screen above a regular terminal as if you exited EmulationStation after using the killall dialog command, but I don't see the actual error message anywhere.

Only have collections starting with letters. es_log.txt here: https://pastebin.com/hszxWE2V.

mitu

OK, time to bring up the big guns. If you have SSH access to the Pi, you can try to get a backtrace from the crash:

Install gdb with

apt -y install gdb

Replace the autostart.sh command to start ES with

gdb -batch -ex "run" -ex "bt" -ex "quit" /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation 2>&1 > /tmp/es.log

So, instead of the normal autostart.sh which contains just

emulationstation #auto

you should have

# emulationstation #auto
gdb -batch -ex "run" -ex "bt" -ex "quit" /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation 2>&1 > /tmp/es.log

You can find the autostart.sh file in /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh, do a backup of it just in case.

Reboot, get the crash message, but don't stop the Pi right away, just SSH in and get the /tmp/es.log file which should contain the crash place in Emulationstation.

hooperre

@mitu

My autostart.sh appears as follows:

emulationstation #auto
gdb -batch -ex "run" -ex "bt" -ex "quit" /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation 2>&1 > /tmp/es.log

~~I did have to change file permissions to 777 in the created directories above to view them. Am I missing a sudo command anywhere? (sudo gdb doesn't seem to make it work.)~~

~~sudo nano /tmp/es.log shows nothing.~~

Am dumb was missing the comment part of # emulationstation #auto on line 1.

es.log: https://pastebin.com/BpXY8K3A

mitu

@hooperre Well, that's the error right there :|. Let's see how we can solve that.

hooperre

@mitu Haha hey thanks for sticking with me this far. It's all gibberish to me so hope you can come up with something! :)

mitu

I did some tests and I can't get a crash because of Kid mode. Would it be possible to make a zip of all the gamelists.xml and collections you have (no ROMs) and upload it somewhere ? You can easily create an archive with

# zip the gamelists
find $HOME/RetroPie/roms/ .emulationstation/gamelists/ -name gamelist.xml | xargs zip -P retropie -@ gamelist.zip

# zip the collections
zip -P retropie -r collections.zip $HOME/.emulationstation/collections/

hooperre

@mitu got an error on the first line xargs: zip: No such file or directory

Second I get -bash: zip: command not found

mitu

@hooperre Ah, I forgot zip is not installed by default. You can install it with

apt -y install zip

then the commands should work.

hooperre

@mitu Okay they worked, but I'm not sure where they're located.

mitu

@hooperre In your home folder (/home/pi) probably.

hooperre

[removed]

mitu

Thanks - you can delete them (they're password protected anyway). I'll give it a shot to see if I can reproduce the error and maybe finding a fix.

mitu

@hooperre - good news, I reproduced the crash with your files. Now I only need to find the fix. It seems the crash happens when the Emulationstation tries to populate the Recent auto-collection, if this collection is no longer displayed (disabled from the settings), the crash happens. You don't event need to have other custom collections, just the regular (All/Fav/Recent) enabled.

I'll see how I can debug this further, we'll find a fix for it.