Retropie black screen at emulator start

Nozban

Hi everyone,

I just finished my installation of retropie on an old desktop computer running debian 10 amd64. I made it auto-login on the pi user then autostart an openbox session on x and autostart emulationstation in the openbox session. ( As I described there : https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/25621/retropie-menu-component-not-opening/3).
ES starts by itself after booting and running smooth but whenever I try to lauch any rom on any system, i will get the lauching screen from the terminal and then black screen without any response from controler or keyboard. I checked the /dev/shm/runcommand.log file and it is not even created.

However, if after the first ES start, i just restart it (by ES GUI "Restart Emulationstation", or close it and relauch in an other terminal) it will run perfectly, every games starts without any problems.

It might have something to do with runcommand not starting properly at first start but I have no idea how to fix it.

I am using retropie 4.5.19 and emulationstation 2.9.1rp, logitech wingman action usb wired controler, usb keyboard, vga output from motherboard.

Thank you.

mitu

If you auto-start just an xterm, then run EmulationStation from it (no arguments), do you get the same error ?

Nozban

Yes, I tried that already, also when I restart ES from its GUI it restarts with the same option so I don't think the problem is there.

Nozban

Oh sorry, I miss understood. If you mean autostart the xterm and then manualy start ES in I didn't try that. I will and let you know
Thanks

Nozban

Ok, so I tried to just put in my /home/pi/.config/openbox/autostart

xterm

and then lauch in emulationstation but this is not working either. Exactly the same happens. I tried also with an st terminal and it is still the same.

mitu

Try this in the autostart file for Openbox:

xterm -fullscreen -e emulationstation &

Nozban

@mitu I have no idea why but this is woking perfecly, even with

xterm -fg white -bg black -fullscreen -e emulationstation &

Thank you very much.

mitu

You might want to change the font to something bigger (xterm -fn <fontname>) if your resolution will make the fonts tiny.