EmulationStation Dies Silently at Boot and from Command Line
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Greetings!
They gave me a free Raspberry Pi at work, and my kids are super excited for RetroPie, so I've been at it for 7 hours tonight trying to get this running. I finally got WiFi and have learned a ton, but the main issue still is that emulationstation just dies immediately, and we can't find any logs and just don't have a clue why. I started with the Lifehacker instructions here: http://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-retro-game-console-498561192 , and went on to read about 1000 other websites. I believe everything is completely up to date, and I feel like I've tried everything. Based on images from Google, I believe this is a Pi 3, and we installed the SD card image (v4.1) found here: https://retropie.org.uk/download/ I'm using a small 1080p Vizio TV connected with HDMI.
Any help is greatly, greatly appreciated, and my kids will love you forever!
Peace.
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@SevenTwenty
Could you please explain in detail how you start it and what happens then? Also just copy paste any error messages that appear. -
@vbs Thank you for the reply.
When we boot the Pi, RetroPie loads, and we can see the splash screen with the joystick pie image, and then it continues loading, and we just now saw that it blinks "illegal instruction" very, very quickly! That must mean something. After that, it goes straight to command line. If we then type "emulationstation" from the command line, the screen goes black very briefly, and then it reloads the command prompt.
Any thoughts on that?
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@SevenTwenty
Sounds like you grabbed the wrong image for your system:
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/First-Installation#sd-imagesSD Images There are currently two versions of RetroPie. There is one version for Raspberry Pi 0/1 (Model A, A+, B, B+) and there is a version for Raspberry Pi 2/3. Download the SD image for your version of Raspberry Pi from the following page: https://retropie.org.uk/download/ If you are unsure which version of Raspberry Pi you have there is an easy way to check: Rpi 0/1= 1 raspberry when the pi boots up Rpi 2/3= 4 raspberries when the pi boots up If you get the error Illegal Instruction when it boots, you picked the wrong SD image. -
@vbs said in EmulationStation Dies Silently at Boot and from Command Line:
Okay. Great. Thank you. We are currently downloading the other image to try that out. You rock. We appreciate you.
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We got it working, but the sound is absolutely horrible. Looking into that now.
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To improve audio quality - https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/sound-issues#white-noise-fix
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@BuZz Thank you for the reply. We're using an HDMI cable, and the sound improved when I added overclocking. Does that link you sent work for HDMI too? I'm going to try it.
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No sorry - thought you were using the headphone jack.
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What if this exact same issue arises after making zero changes to a retropie that had been working for several months?
I was playing snes roms for an hour or so, plugged in my keyboard to test out Kodi, and all of the sudden an error began popping up "illegal instruction" when attempting to boot/reboot the Pi.
I've run the retropie update scripts, hoping that could solve the issue but it hasn't. Now the "illegal instruction" does not appear, however the Emulation Station splash screen flashes for half a second, and then its back to the initial boot up command line screen.
My filesystem is far from full, so I know that's not an issue.
I've also attempted to remove one console worth of ROMS to see if ES is overloaded in anyway, to no avail. Any help would be tremendously appreciated.
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