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

[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:

1. Install gdb with

apt -y install gdb

2. 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.

[hooperre]

@mitu Well done. Thanks for your help and hope it helps someone else out!

[mitu]

@hooperre A fix has been submitted and accepted, it will appear sometimes in the emulationstation package. If you want to try out the fix, you can install the emulationstation-dev package, which should contain the fix.

[hooperre]

@mitu Excellent! I'll give it a shot.