Emulation Station intermittently shows emulators

hoeveler

Has my Emulation Station config somehow become corrupted? I was seeing my Arcade, Macintosh, Daphne, Ports, etc show up in the Emulation Station just fine, but then they started appearing every other reboot, and now they don't appear at all. And now I just rebooted and ES is saying no gamepads detected, asking me to set up my controller again. Then I would hit F4 to quit ES, then type emulationstation and everything would start up correctly, including listing Arcade, Daphne, etc.

I have NO IDEA why my RetroPie experience has become so fraught with these kinds of issues! I've also noticed that ssh/ftp would go inactive, and the ssh.txt file I placed on the sd card boot partition would go away on its own, requiring me to turn it back on again in the pi configs.

I don't know if this is related, but I had installed the "launching images" package from the retropie config menus which was working but then seemed to limit my ability to get into the runcommand options when opening a ROM or Macintosh, for example, so I "removed" it using the same menu panel that I used to install it (in the configuration options GUI), rebooted, but then it still appeared. Didn't seem like it actually removed it, and now a couple reboots later and my problem above is happening (where now I don't see Arcade, Daphne, or Macintosh, or Ports).

Pi Model 4
Power Supply used: USB-C 5v 3a CanaKit power supply
RetroPie Version Used: 4.8
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie website flashed to a new 128GB SD card
USB Devices connected:
One 4-port powered USB3 hub - plugged into Pi USB port
Seagate 1TB portable HDD - plugged into powered hub
HID 1241:1122 (RetroArcade.us trackball) - plugged into Pi USB port
HP Keyboard - plugged into hub
Ultimarc LED Controller - plugged into hub
Ultimarc SpinTrak (Spinner) - plugged into hub
Ultimarc UltraStik - plugged into hub
NVIDIA Controller v01.04 - added via bluetooth.
Controller used: Ultimarc UltraStik, with 8 buttons connected directly to it in USB "input mode".

hoeveler

UPDATE: I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but now I'm completely shut out of my emulator menus. Rebooting no longer makes them return. Something has gone wrong, and I've been warned not to delve into config files in my last request for help, so what now?

mitu

Post a system log - the output of dmesg- and the EmulationStation log file, which you can find in $HOME/.emulationstation/es_log.txt.
You can also run EmulationStation in debug mode, by running it with

emulationstation --debug

and this should produce more info in the es_log.txt file.

hoeveler

@mitu I will post those next - but please see my other reply - I will have to chalk this hiccup up to a USB cable or something. It's working now. BUT, the "launching images" package is still active, I'll bet that uninstalling the package didn't undo whatever the setting it had set up for ES to use, so it's still showing the images on emulator launch. But I will post my logs just to be sure.

hoeveler

@mitu Here's the output of dmesg
https://pastebin.com/rSSjEbZe

For some reason the SSH / FTP connection is still not staying alive (that seems to be the only major problem still left to resolve) so I'll have to try after a reboot to get the es_log.txt. I wonder if that will show up after a reboot or if I need to run emulationstation --debug again?

EDIT: I restarted and ssh / ftp worked again. Here's the es_log:
https://pastebin.com/YeDhNNLT
One thing I wonder if you can see from the logs - in the Macintosh emulation menu item I have two entries - Start and Start ;) - if I select the first one, the mac boots with a 640x480 windowed portion of the upper left of display. If I select the second one, the mac boots with a 640x480 full screen mode. I don't even know how these two entries were created other than me trying to go into the Configuration/Tools and selecting "Backend" to use the other graphic rendering mode. Does my log show anything related to that?

mitu

@hoeveler said in Emulation Station intermittently shows emulators:

... if I select the first one, the mac boots with a 640x480 windowed portion of the upper left of display. If I select the second one, the mac boots with a 640x480 full screen mode.

2nd entry it's probably using dispmanx as backend, since this allows for fullscreen scaling.

I don't even know how these two entries were created other than me trying to go into the Configuration/Tools and selecting "Backend" to use the other graphic rendering mode. Does my log show anything related to that?

No, the log doesn't print the ROMs. How many disk images do you have under the apple2 folder ? The backend helper doesn't add anything to the ROM folders, just instructs runcommand about which video backend/options is to be used when running the emulator.

hoeveler

@mitu it's the macintosh folder, and here's the contents:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi         0 Nov 15 02:31 Desktop
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi 209715200 Nov 20 11:22 disk.img
drwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi    131072 Nov 19 13:41 .finf
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi   1048576 Sep 14  2010 mac.rom
drwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi    131072 Nov 19 13:41 .rsrc
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi         0 Nov 19 09:18 start.txt

Inside of the .finf directory appears to be a duplicate (symlinks?) of the macintosh directory:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi     32 Nov 20 11:22 Desktop
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi     32 Nov 19 11:38 disk.img
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi     32 Nov 19 11:38 mac.rom
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi     32 Nov 19 13:41 start.txt

Inside of the .rsrc directory has another Desktop and start.txt file:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi    321 Nov 18 23:32 Desktop
-rwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi      0 Nov 19 13:41 start.txt

I checked the start.txt files and they are both empty, so it must be in the basiliskii.cfg or other config file to dictate which backend it's using, and maybe if I'm lucky... I can manually define my resolution there? And maybe I can clean up the "start" listings and/or rename that? Can you point me somewhere to teach me about the use of start.txt files in RetroPie? I can't seem to find it in the docs.