Retropie on Raspbian Buster

mitu

@geekinchief I didn't experience the black screen. What display/system do you have ?

BuZz

@geekinchief are you using a rpi4 ? Buster is not yet supported anyway yet, so I'm not sure how useful this thread is - unless you are able to code/debug and work on the support yourself.

geekinchief

@BuZz I am using a Pi 4, yes, so was hoping to find a way to at least try some of the emulators on it.

psyke83

This post is deleted!

mikem

I updated my RPI2 running raspbian/retropie to buster. I needed to make some adaptions to mupen64plus-video-gles2n64 [1] for mupen64plus (which i personally do not use) to build. And emulationstation does not autostart because the pi user does not login automatically anymore (need to check why), but after logging in with pi on tty1 ES starts and at least the SNES-Emulator runs fine.

[1] https://github.com/ricrpi/mupen64plus-video-gles2n64/pull/26

geekinchief

@mikem So you had a working Retropie image running Stretch and then used in-place updates to get to Buster?

mikem

@geekinchief yeah. To be exact, I had a working Jessie image running (had no time to play in a while now), updated it to stretch for a game night (there I had some upgrade issues with some libs, but could sort everything out) and a few days later Raspbian Buster was announced and I thought I give it a try, to see what works.
Debian upgrade was working fine. But I need to say, that I always do a quite conservative way in upgrading: Updating dpkg/apt/aptitude first. Then upgrading a lot of packages step-by-step to see which package upgrade pulls in which dependency (and manually avoid some recommended installs). But I checked the output of 'dist-upgrade' and seemed reasonable.
Then updated RetroPie, which rebuilt some libs (mostly SDL) which took some time. Then it failed because of mupen64plus (described in my previous post). And then I needed to remove the old build-files of usbromservice/usbmount (do not have the logs anymore), because of a repo-cloning issue (something like: 'expected a folder, but was a regular file').

I can provide a list, which emulator I have installed (using only snes and sega megadrive).

mikem

@mitu the fix [1] to build mupen64plus-video-gles2n64 has just been merged and the referenced issue [2] is resolved. So the basic installation should work now.

[1] https://github.com/ricrpi/mupen64plus-video-gles2n64/pull/26
[2] https://github.com/ricrpi/mupen64plus-video-gles2n64/issues/25

romanbsd

I'm unable to start emulationstation on buster:

Linux retropie 4.19.57-v7+ #1244 SMP Thu Jul 4 18:45:25 BST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux

log:

lvl2: 	EmulationStation - v2.8.4rp, built Jul 14 2019 - 23:22:03
lvl2: 	Parsing XML file "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/resources/mamenames.xml"...
lvl2: 	Parsing XML file "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/resources/mamebioses.xml"...
lvl2: 	Parsing XML file "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/resources/mamedevices.xml"...
lvl2: 	Creating surface...
lvl0: 	Error initializing SDL!
	
lvl0: 	Renderer failed to initialize!
lvl0: 	Window failed to initialize!

Tried rebuilding emulationstation.
I even tried sdl2 from this PR: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/pull/2770

ii  libsdl2-2.0-0:armhf                  2.0.9+dfsg1-1+rpt1+videocorerpi1      armhf        Simple DirectMedia Layer
hi  libsdl2-dev                          2.0.9+dfsg1-1+rpt1+videocorerpi1      armhf        Simple DirectMedia Layer development files

Still doesn't work. What can it be? What can I check?
Thanks!

mitu

@romanbsd Are you using a PI4 ? Then see @buzz's previous reply.

romanbsd

Nope. RPI 3B+

mitu

@romanbsd What variant of Raspbian are you using ? The full (desktop) or the lite version ? Are you starting Emulationstation from the console or from the desktop environment ?

romanbsd

I upgraded the retropie's raspbian to buster by changing /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list

mitu

@romanbsd Buster is not supported at the moment - as it's stated through this topic. If you'd like to test RetroPie on Buster, then you should start from scratch and perform a Manual Installation.

romanbsd

I understand that. Unfortunately I learned that after the upgrade. Having said that, I'm willing to do some debugging before I reformat and reinstall :)

mitu

@romanbsd Did you re-install from source all the RetroPie's packages ?

romanbsd

@mitu I did. Did the complete update from the RetroPie-Setup
Since then I recompiled emulationstation with:

retropie's sdl2 (installed by RetroPie-Setup)
buster's sdl2 (modified sdl2.sh to return version as "2.0.9+dfsg1-1+rpt1" for that)
sdl2 from this PR: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/pull/2770
All behave the same.
It's interesting that the reason for error is blank.

mitu

I forgot about the version bump - but I think it should work with variant 1. I don't have a buster install at the moment on the RP3, so I can't confirm.

psyke83

I haven't been focusing my attention on testing the legacy driver on RPI3 + buster yet, but I did verify that my SDL2 PR branch works correctly at least with emulationstation (when re-compiled after the videocore version of the SDL packages are installed). I re-checked again, and it's still working fine.

I'm testing from a buster desktop image; perhaps the dist-upgrade from stretch has caused compatibility issues. A full log of the SDL2 build might be helpful in diagnosing the issue.

romanbsd

Silly me. The HDMI cable was disconnected.