Solution for " White Screen of Death "

edmaul69

@Rookervik said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

@edmaul69

There's a minimum amount of VRAM required to display certain size wallpapers. If you have just 1, 1920x0180 wallpaper, you MUST have 256 meg RAM split. But that 256 RAM split will take you up to 10 or so wallpapers. The next jump is probably 512 split. Which should still be just fine with most of the emulators that the Pi can handle.

You can make sure your theme wallpapers are 720p and that will help you with the RAM issues. ES was not designed for the Pi, but it works.

The Carbon theme was designed for the Pi's limited video RAM just for the white screen problems. If you're going to make some custom themes, try thinking in 'parts' instead of 'wallpapers.' Several 512x512 images take less VRAM than a 1920x1080 wallpaper. Try to re-use elements so ES doesn't have to fill VRAM with a massive picture.

On the system select screen it is still carbon on the inside its custom. the pics are really really tiny because i made them previously on the simple theme and it uses the stretching. Most of the pics are around 10x10 pixels. They have different fonts in each console though. The fact that i can have eleven of them on 256 megs but cant have 14 of them on 384 makes no sense.

Rookervik

@edmaul69

That is very strange. A 10x10 pixel image will take the VRAM of a 16x16 image. Everything unwraps to a power of 2. As long as these images are not SVGs. An SVG stretched to full screen takes a canvas to display, and that canvas takes the full VRAM of that area. So even if the SVG has a single line in it, and the file size is 0.5kb, it will take the same VRAM as a 1080p PNG uncompressed. Fonts shouldn't take too much RAM, and they are regular RAM. Try 512 RAM split. 384 hasn't ever made any difference for me before.

If you're still bothered by things, you can try zipping up the theme and sending it to me. I can look at it and figure out what you problem is.

edmaul69

@Rookervik said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

@edmaul69

That is very strange. A 10x10 pixel image will take the VRAM of a 16x16 image. Everything unwraps to a power of 2. As long as these images are not SVGs. An SVG stretched to full screen takes a canvas to display, and that canvas takes the full VRAM of that area. So even if the SVG has a single line in it, and the file size is 0.5kb, it will take the same VRAM as a 1080p PNG uncompressed. Fonts shouldn't take too much RAM, and they are regular RAM. Try 512 RAM split. 384 hasn't ever made any difference for me before.

If you're still bothered by things, you can try zipping up the theme and sending it to me. I can look at it and figure out what you problem is.

So changing the
gpu_mem_1024=500
made absolutely no difference. Most of my themes have an 8x8 solid color block. Maybe 2 of them. If they need a stripe on the top it might have a 1x343 pic. A few of the ones i have working have a pic of woodgrain or metal for the top or bottom less than 350x350. None of the 3 / 4 themes i am trying to add use more than 2 8x8 pics. None of the ones i am trying to add have a pic bigger than 8x8.

EDIT: is there a way to verify how much ram is being used for the gpu? I have a whole extensive overclocking list of stuff that i got from someone online for running n64 games and when i had it all set in the config.txt it made absolutely no improvements. And that had my cpu overclocked at 1450 and i saw no improvement. So im not sure if the themes my problem now or if overclocking and ram split is a problem. I have to have force_edid_audio for the sound to work on my tv but i wouldnt think that would affect this. It tells me it cant be overclocked in raspi-config on both 3.7 and 4.0 beta 2. I will start a new thread on the config.txt problems if that is my issue

Rookervik

@edmaul69

So tell me, is this white screen a completely white screen, so you can't see anything, or is it a white theme with none of your theming elements? From what you're saying, you are actually using less assets than Carbon itself. Which can load 60 systems without RAM issues. Does your theme look like this when you load it? If so, the theme xml files have errors in them.
alt text

Also, keep in mind that the RAM splits should stay in powers of 2. Just like any images you use in the theme. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096... Your 1x343 image uses the same RAM a 512x512 image would take, as does the 350x350 image. They all unfold to a power of 2 in VRAM.

edmaul69

@Rookervik said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

@edmaul69

So tell me, is this white screen a completely white screen, so you can't see anything, or is it a white theme with none of your theming elements? From what you're saying, you are actually using less assets than Carbon itself. Which can load 60 systems without RAM issues. Does your theme look like this when you load it? If so, the theme xml files have errors in them.

Also, keep in mind that the RAM splits should stay in powers of 2. Just like any images you use in the theme. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096... Your 1x343 image uses the same RAM a 512x512 image would take, as does the 350x350 image. They all unfold to a power of 2 in VRAM.

No my theme stuff is not blank. All the themes i have added and are trying to add all work. I just boot to a pure white screen when i have too many of them.

Rookervik

@edmaul69

Welp, I've suggested everything I can think of. I've made 3 or 4 themes and if you keep the assets small in size then you don't run into memory issues. You say your assets are small, so I can't really figure out what the problem is. Sorry. :(

KillerQ

@Rookervik

Even though this white screen of death has been addressed on the official emulationststion website, has anyone come up with a fix? I am on testing some theories this weekend.

herb_fargus

@KillerQ unless these theories include recoding the source code of emulationstation, all attempts will just be a band-aid that will barely address the symptoms rather than a cure. I know @fieldofcows had talked about some stuff he was working on with SQLite and the metadata and I'm sure he's been working on the wsod as well, but it's a pretty massive change

Rookervik

Where's this "Zoid Theme" hiding? I need to look at it.

Rookervik

@KillerQ And as Herb mentioned, there is no cure for the Raspberry Pi version of ES. There simply isn't enough RAM to use themes with large graphical assets.

EmulationStation renders the ENTIRE THEME onto a massive canvas. The viewing area is then slid around viewing this canvas. Changing systems, moving back to the system select. It's because of this massive canvas with all of the art pasted that the Raspberry Pi runs out of Video RAM. Desktop PCs tend to have gigabytes of RAM available for graphics. Not the Pi. So while the Pi can handle a couple systems with 1080p art... when you start adding more and more systems... the ES canvas gets gigantic and the pi just flat can't load all that art and keep it in RAM. There is no cure or fix for it. Just a reduction in the size of assets. That's all you can do because of how ES displays themes.

mediamogul

@Rookervik

You mentioned above that Carbon can load 60 systems before reaching the WSOD issue. Are there any factors that would compound the problem and lower that number, such as the addition of video previews or even an excess of scraped cover art?

Rookervik

@mediamogul Video Previews and Image Previews are loaded as-needed. Once you change your game selection, the old image is unloaded and the new image is loaded. You shouldn't ever run into WSOD just from previews. Previews are not part of the big canvas. They're overlays.

I tried to use this as a tricky way of having infinite wallpapers, but alas, the image previews load over the top of EVERYTHING else on the screen except the Logo graphic.

mediamogul

@Rookervik said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

I tried to use this as a tricky way of having infinite wallpapers, but alas, the image previews load over the top of EVERYTHING else

Clever thought though.

mattrixk

@Rookervik said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

I tried to use this as a tricky way of having infinite wallpapers, but alas, the image previews load over the top of EVERYTHING else on the screen except the Logo graphic.

And with that one sentence, you just dashed my idea of using UXS to create full-screen scraped images with a large fan-art background. Darn. Good thing I hadn't made it too far into it. Oh well, I can still make the theme, it just won't have the fan-art background.

I have a related question for you Rook. You said above that a 10x10 image uses as much VRAM as a 16x16 image, so you may as well use a 16x16. The new theme I'm making uses a custom UXS MIX profile to combine box-art, screenshot and game logo into one image, instead of just a single scraped image. At the moment that combined image is 440x440. Would it make any difference to the resources used if I just made it 512x512 instead? That way the image would be a bit crisper when it scales up.

Rookervik

@mattrixk That should be 100% correct. Everything should unfold into powers of 2 in Video RAM.

mattrixk

@Rookervik okay good to know. Cheers. (I'm still sad about not being able to use fan-art though)

fieldofcows

I haven't looked at the wsod problem in any detail yet but I can think of two options to address this from the top of my head:

With the changes I'm making to the metadata I should be able to make ES contain only a single 'game list view' and dynamically change it when the selection changes meaning you would not have the giant canvas anymore. This needs further investigation to see how difficult it will be. I can imagine that keeping the context of each 'system' will be an issue
Implement some sort of texture manager that manages the texture memory based on what is currently on display. The manager will keep track of where the texture is used on the canvas and if it is not currently on display then it is a candidate for being purged if texture memory is low. It can then be dynamically reloaded when needed again.

I haven't yet run into the wsod problem myself. If I had then I surely would have had a closer look. Is there a simple way to reproduce this without having to configure a large system? Is there a config someone could easily share without breaking forum rules? (i.e. no ROMS)

fieldofcows

@mattrixk said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

(I'm still sad about not being able to use fan-art though)

What do you need for this to work?

mattrixk

@fieldofcows said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

What do you need for this to work?

I don't know how much work it would be (and I've mentioned it on another thread), but I'd love it if we could have the option to add multiple images to a ROM.

On vanilla ES, there is only one Image field in the metadata (<image name="md_image">), but in your Video Preview mod, there is also <image name="md_marquee">, so I'm curious how hard it would be for you to add more Image fields to the metadata.

I suppose the easiest would be just having a second Image field (called <image name="md_image_2"> or something), which I could use for fan-art, but to be honest, I think it would be fantastic to have a separate Image field for each Image:

Fan-art
Box-art
Screenshot
Game Logo
Marquee

That way a themer could have a lot more display options. There may be others, but I think they are the main ones. Maybe even an "md_image_misc" just for use with random images someone might want to put in there.

While I'm on the subject, would it possible to change the z-index of all the metadata fields? At the moment, I think "md_image" sits on top of everything else, no matter where the code for it sits in the XML file. It would be great if we could set the hierarchy of all the metadata fields so we could put anything in front of anything else.

EDIT: an idea for sparking the WSOD:

You can take empty .TXT files and name them game.zip and put one in each system folder. The systems accept take zip files will read these as games and show that system on the System view (you obviously won't be able to scrape or play them, but you won't need to).

Then change to the Simple theme (or another theme with 1080p background images). If you don't have enough systems, go through them one at a time and change game.zip to game.[whatever extension that system accepts] until you have enough to cause the WSOD.

(I haven't tested this, but it should work)

KillerQ

@Rookervik said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

@mediamogul Video Previews and Image Previews are loaded as-needed. Once you change your game selection, the old image is unloaded and the new image is loaded. You shouldn't ever run into WSOD just from previews. Previews are not part of the big canvas. They're overlays.

I tried to use this as a tricky way of having infinite wallpapers, but alas, the image previews load over the top of EVERYTHING else on the screen except the Logo graphic.

Thanks for all the info. Reducing image sizes the simple theme allowed me to have 23 systems with no issues whatsoever - but it's still a bandaid.

You mentioned hat video clips are treated differently as they load when the system is selected - as opposed to being always on and loaded in the background similar to the background canvass.

What if you told each system selection screen to have a one second (to reduce waste) fullscreen 1080p video clip hat remains paused. This would serve the same purpose, but I wonder if it could be forced into the background?

Just thinking out loud.