DietPi RetroPie install

[ayrasci]

Hi,

I have been trying to install RetroPie over DietPi, which is Raspbian based, and is even listed on the OS's website as a link. I figured I would ask both forums and see what turns up since I tried searching for the issue on both DietPi's site and here. I am using a clean, fresh install of DietPi with no extra software installed and no desktop installed. I just have the terminal. The DietPi install went smoothly, and I followed the GitHub instructions like I always do to install RetroPie. The setup script ran and installed all packages for RetroPie as expected. However, on reboot, emulationstation failed to launch both from autostart and using the command "emulationstation". I keep getting the error:

lvl10: Error initializing SDL!

lvl10: Renderer failed to initialize!
lvl10: Window failed to initialize!

Any ideas? Thanks!!! :)

[wetriner]

https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/395
http://tristan.terpelle.be/2015/05/emulationstation-error-initializing-sdl.html

Looks like SDL2 is the culprit, but I don't know enough to advise on how to properly recompile it. I can say though that if your intention is to save space on an SD card, the official retropie image is built on a customized raspbian lite install. So it's already very slim.

[BuZz]

dietpi is not supported. Can only support Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi (dietpi may well remove stuff we rely on - and there isn't time to support more distros). as @wetriner said, our image is based on Raspbian Lite anyway, which is pretty slim - I can't see any benefit gained from using Diet Pi with RetroPie.

[ayrasci]

Thanks for the replies. Was exploring it to use in a dual boot combining RetroPie and Rasplex. Had posted my first attempt here and another user asked me about using diet pi instead. I decided to try it hoping it would improve performance for games like N64 and Playstation which I had lag issues with on RetroPie with a Raspberry pi 2 and 3. I am otherwise very happy with the Raspbian version. Could see myself using Diet Pi for other reasons tho. I liked the install menu with the option to set up a USB drive and install your choice of desktops and optimized software. All the things I don't need for a gaming machine... ;D

If anyone wants to try my dual boot, complete with built-in convenient OS switching ability, you can download it here. It's based on noobs. Only issue is that you will have to use a keyboard to navigate to the retropie menu to configure your other controllers when you first boot RetroPie since I already ran the initial startup controller configuration. (Key Mapping - A=A, B=S, Start=Enter, Select=Space, Directions=Arrow Keys ) Will have to fix that at some point. Think I may have added some open source games to it but can't remember. Otherwise, it doesn't include any games or media, just the OSes. Just extract the archive and copy the contents to an empty SD card and pop it in your pi 2 or 3. Don't think it works for pi 1 or zero but never tried.

[BuZz]

DietPi will not help the performance at all - not in any way that couldn't be done on Raspbian.

[inteldork]

I am also using DietPi and hit the exact same issue. I fully understand the RetroPi community not wishing to spend time supporting another OS.

I am replying to OP with hopes we can help each other out.
I noticed the following in the RetroPi-Setup logs:

...
dpkg: error processing package libsdl2-dev:armhf (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 libsdl2-2.0-0:armhf
 libsdl2-dev:armhf
...
dpkg: error processing package libsdl1.2-dev (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 libsdl1.2debian:armhf
 libsdl1.2-dev
...

I tried a few fruitless experiments.

• Installing the packages manually
• Building SDL from source

@ayrasci Did you ever get it working?

[BuZz]

@inteldork those sdl errors are normal. The dependencies get fixed after usually.