Launching anything from emulationstation results in black screen only: 3.7 pi3

[wmcclelion]

Raspberry Pi3
No overclocking
RetroPie 3.7 updated from 3.6
pi@retropie:~ $ uname -a
Linux retropie 4.4.9-v7+ #884 SMP Fri May 6 17:28:59 BST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Installed RetroPie 3.6 image and all was well. I have been up and running for months.
I update to 3.7 a few weeks ago and all went well, expect I did not get the new retropie menu look in emulationstation, ie the new speaker icon and such.
Today I decided to play around with some new MAME games and had several fail to launch, not a big deal.
This prompted me to do a RetroPie script update and a Binary Install. I did these from inside emulationstation. All seemed to go fine and I got my new icons in the Retropie menu.

Tried to launch one of the MAME games that had been crashing and got a black screen that will not exit. Nothing will make it close. F4, Esc, B on the gamepad, nothing will close it.

I can still SSH into the Pi so is did a sudo su, shutdown -r now. It rebooted as expected and now anything I try to launch in emulationstation station gives me the uncloseable black screen. Even hitting F4 from emulationstation just gives hanging black screen. If I SSH into the Pi and run the retropie-setup and change the system to boot to command line then launch emulationstation I can run items from it, but get either no sound or delayed sound. I am planning to backup my bios and ROM folders and do a clean install, but thought I might run this past you guys first. Even if we can't save my install it might offer good diagnostic info. Please let me know if more info is needed.

[wmcclelion]

Looked at the es_log.txt today after hitting F4 to exit emulationstation and getting the black screen. This was the last line:
lvl1: requested mismatched theme type for [detailed.md_releasedate] - expected "datetime", got "text"

[wmcclelion]

Looking at that log info led me to thinking it was a theme issue. Launched the retropie set from ssh and removed the carbon theme. Rebooted and ES launched to what I am guessing is the pixel theme. I am now able to launch games, but I still have bad audio lag. If I jump in Super Mario on NES the jump sound plays after Mario has landed.

[wmcclelion]

Result! It would seem that after doing the binary install from the 3.6 image my version of Raspbian was also updated. I'm not sure what broke my carbon theme, but removing and reinstalling it fixed the game launch issues and the F4 exit issues. That left me with the sound lag issues. I decided to test in Xwindows to see if the audio lag was systemic or just Emulationstation related. When I launched X from the command line I was greeted with a message that since my version of Raspbian had been updated some config files needed to be updated. I was able to watch YouTube videos with no audio lag. I then changed my system to boot to Emulationstation rather than command line and restarted. The sounds in Emulationstation were working( the sounds as you scroll through your game lists). I launched Super Mario Brothers and the sounds were fine. Tested other games and systems and as of now all tests are good.

Conclusion, if you have done an update that includes updates to the Raspbian files, launch XWindows and let it do what ever reconfig it needs to do restart and test again.

[sbooob]

I just had the a similar issue, running Retropie 4.0-beta2.

After rebooting, I got stuck to the "No gamepad detected" screen. I'm using a ps3 bluetooth controller, I see this every time I boot, while the controller is connecting to the pi, after which the main emulation station screen usually show up. That didn't hapen today.

I had a look at the emulationstation log file (~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt) and found the same error as you:

lvl1: requested mismatched theme type for [detailed.md_releasedate] - expected "datetime", got "text"

As well as a line confirming that my ps3 controller had in fact successfully connected , which lead me to think that I was stuck on the "No gamepad detected" for some other reason than no gamepad being detected:

lvl2: Added known joystick PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller (instance ID: 0, device index: 0

I fixed this by running Manage packages > Update all installed packages in the setup script (using SSH), but simply re-installing the carbon theme in /etc/emulationstation/themes/carbon should do the trick.

Hope this helps!