Emulation Station crashes on startup when I add to gamelist.xml

szude

I'm going through my xmls and manually adding <favorite> and <hidden> tags for gui purposes. I do this enough and eventually I have an error when launching that says emulation station crashed - if this is your first startup, check stuff, and change themes.

However, I've narrowed it down and it happens by virtue of the collective gamelist.xml being too big. I add 6 lines to my current and it will crash. I've tried adding different tags like hidden, or last played, and it happens on each. And it happens whether or not I do it in my MAME one or NES, or megadrive. So it's like I'm at the cusp of max gamelist'ing.

Can anyone tell me the source of this problem? I would like to keep adding, and I also worry that if I play new games, it will add playcount and last played lines and tip me over into crashing again. Do I need to increase some buffer, or turn off a flag somewhere?

I am running a Pi3+, with a 64 GB SD card.

I can post a screenshot of crash if I can regenerate it if needed.

mitu

Please add more info about your system, including the RetroPie / EmulationStation version you're using - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

szude

Roger roger.

Power Supply used: switchable 5V
RetroPie Version Used : 4.4.13
Emulation station: 2.8.3RP
Built From: retropie noobs
USB Devices connected:keyboard and keyboard based joysticks
Error messages received: Blue screen "ES crashed"
File: gamelist.xml

mitu

@szude said in Emulation Station crashes on startup when I add to gamelist.xml:

RetroPie Version Used : 2.8.3RP (this is my emulation station, same thing?)

No, it's not the same thing - EmulationStation and RetroPie don't share a common version.
2.8.3RP looks like an older version - 2.9.0 is more than 1 year old at this time and it's the current version used in RetroPie.

It would be useful to have the gamelist.xml that crashes EmulationStation, archived maybe ?

szude

@mitu Edited. Don't know how that happened with ES, I built this last Apr/May, and that's what my RP version reflects.

mitu

I think I confused the years - 2.9 was tagged this year as the stable version - 2.8 was released with 4.5 the previous year.
Nevertheless, without a faulting gamelist.xml to reproduce the crash we can't say where is the problem.

szude

The crash display.

Will upload file shortly - can't right now.

mitu

@szude That's a generic error message when EmulationStation cannot start - could be also gamelist error.
Start EmulationStation from the command line with debug logging and see where it stops:

emulationtation --debug

szude

Ok will do.

I think I'll have to revert the change, restart, quit out of ES, re instantiate the change, and then do your command.

szude

debug didn't work, it just displays the crash screen and I can't see any of the log that preceded it.

gamelist uploaded here
https://paste.ee/p/G37Up

Lines 17-18 and 37-38 were added and pushed it from a working state to crashing.

as a reminder, this file is not necessarily the problem by itself. This is the NES gamelist that I edited, but I edited the MAME gamelist in the same way and got the same result.

szude

@mitu This had me wondering, is it a good idea to update ES/RP from the setup menu in the midst of this? Is that likely to fix it or just make things more confused?

szude

I have this new info and getting closer

https://paste.ee/p/yUZKL

This is the es log I managed to extract when it goes bad. It looks like it doesn't like the last played tags that I'm adding manually? Because it dies in the middle of this.

Now this wasn't my original problem, I was just testing text, but it was happening originally when I was added favorite/hidden tags. Which I see above is also doing some parsing on that.

So I'm wondering, do I do something with these /etc/emulationstation/themes/showcase/auto-favorites locations? Should/can I get rid of them? Or what are they exactly if you can tell me that?

mitu

Now this wasn't my original problem, I was just testing text, but it was happening originally when I was added favorite/hidden tags. Which I see above is also doing some parsing on that.

I've looked at the .xml file, it looks ok - there's no formatting error and it seems to be loaded ok by EmulationStation.
The 2nd log is also not showing an error per se, just some warnings.

So I'm wondering, do I do something with these /etc/emulationstation/themes/showcase/auto-favorites locations? Should/can I get rid of them? Or what are they exactly if you can tell me that?

That's not a problem, you can leave it aside.

How many ROMs you have in total ?

You should get the crash message by running ES directly with

/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/emulationstation --debug

szude

@mitu My roms are 4700 for MAME, 800 for genesis, 2300 for Nes, and then like 300 for the Atari systems.

I thought I had made some progress. I figured that because the log stopped during the themes, it had something to do with that. I took the advice and changed to carbon theme, rewrote my gamelist with the "bad" version, and everything came up fine. I could even change the theme back to my original showcase and it worked.

I thought I was good. Then, I played something and shut down. The next time I brought up, it crashed again. So it seems to have something to do with the system adding and/or parsing last played and played count tags. The last log I looked at seemed like it died even sooner. It never even got to parsing the auto-last-played or auto-favorites.

I feel like I need to cleanup some of the theme stuff or possibly some of the stuff ES saves in the last played xml, but I wouldn't know where to begin with that. Maybe in retropie menu, unload and re-load/update the themes?

BTW I also have about 5 GB free so I'm not running out of space.

mitu

You can turn off the last played/favorites - I think by default EmulationStation shows the last 50 played games. But it shouldn't crash because of the values - it looks like there might be something with the theme (if Carbon, the default, works fine).
There's no last played .xml file, EmulationStation reads the tags from all the available games/roms and adds the last 50 to the collection automatically.

szude

@mitu carbon did work, when I first switched to it, but it even it will crash now when the bigger gamelist gets added to with new last played tags. It seems to be in roughly the same place judging by the log.

But thanks, I will try turning some elements off and see if that helps.

mitu

Are you adding the lastplayed tags manually to the gamelist ? Why ?

szude

@mitu I was at one point, solely as an experiment, to see if any type of tag was triggering it (because I first noticed it when adding hidden tags manually). But the last time it crashed it was because ES was doing its adding of tags (last played under the hood. Essentially gamelist was in a working state, ES came up, playing a game added to the xml, shut down, and then next time ES was launched it crashed, with no manual tinkering by me.

I have some good success so far turning off last played and favorites altogether, trying some more experiments.

mitu

Try to update EmulationStation to the latest version, just as an experiment.

szude

@mitu Yeah, sounds good, thanks.