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

szude

I have this new info and getting closer

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.

szude

Thanks for the help.

To update, it looks like everything is working after disabling the favorites and last played menus. I also updated what I could to the latest; there was a conflict on setup script so that wouldn't go without massaging. I still feel like the underlying problem is still there and would come back if I re-enable, but I'm not going to pursue farther.