raspberry pi 4b 4gb weak or no hdmi signal

melbmatt50

I have just recently gotten a new raspberry pi 4b 4gb model. I formatted the sd card that came with it and flashed retropie 4.6 from the retropie site on it and have connected it to my tv but the sd card despite verifying the image doesn't show the flashing green light to indicate booting on my board and I get a weak or no hdmi signal message on the tv.

I have only once been able to get it to boot into retropie and I dont know what was different about that time. I have read comments online about the pi having a weak hdmi signal and there perhaps needing to have some editing done in one of the config files.

Can people tell me if you set up retropie on a raspberry pi 4 the same way as previous raspberry pi versions eg. you format the sd card in fat32, then just use either etcher or windisk 32 to flash the retropie image onto it with no other software neccessary, or is there another software or something I need to install during the process or what I am doing wrong.

I apologize for the long post but I am trying to make sure that I have provided all neccessary information. This is extremely frustrating to me for both the money paid out and the time and effort spent trying to get this going which I believed would be a straightforward process.

dankcushions

anecdotally, the first micro hdmi cable i bought for my pi4 wasn't good enough, so i had to buy another. however let's prove it's booting first:

are you able to SSH into the pi to prove it's booted?
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/SSH/

if you're not connected via ethernet, you will need to set up headless wifi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/headless.md

melbmatt50

I dont know how to do this as I cannot see any display on the tv screen that it is connected to so can you tell me how I do this and what software I may need to do so and what I should do once I am in there if I get in there.

dankcushions

@melbmatt50 i did - both links are instructions for “headless” (no screen) set ups. you just need to plug your sd card into the pc you used to the write the image and create files in the /boot/ partition.