Your most frustrating moment?

mattrixk

Two nights ago. I'd spent a few days getting Kodi running, and set up with my Emby Server, Aeon Nox theme, custom pages, settings, background images, sub menus, etc.

Rebooted Kodi.

All gone.

All the installed add-ons where still there, but Aeon Nox had reset to defaults. Fudge it, I'm going back to dual-boot.

RedBatman

@mattrixk That's rather odd, do you think your SD card might have a bad partition?

mattrixk

@RedBatman I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't know enough about the backend side of things to troubleshoot it. Kodi was running quite slowly before, and I was getting some core dumps too.

I have a dual-boot working fine on my main setup, so I'm just going to do that on this one too.

meleu

@InsecureSpike said in Your most frustrating moment?:

i remember when emulation station had no default theme, just the white background, black select bar and system text and rom list.

And I thought that the most amazing thing in the world. My reaction: "What?! Can I play Marvel vs Capcom on this little board?!"

About frustration, I had some while configuring controllers for pifba. Actually it is still frustrating, but once I got a raspi2 I started to use the lr-fba, which makes me happy.

PetroRie

Ultimate n00b mistake; I connected a keyboard to the first USB port and a PS4 controller to the second one and I assumed that the controller would function as the first controller in a game which it didn't. It took me a while to figure this stupid mistake out.

RedBatman

Actually one thing I forgot to mention that is still kinda bothering me is that pressing select and start doesn't exist roms anymore, and it's been doing this for awhile now.

I use a wireless Xbox 360 controller and I use the Xpad driver, I once tried the 360 driver but if I remember right it gave me some issues and pretty much people and even the official website said to use Xpad since the 360 driver has compatability issues. Which I would like to know if they have been fixed yet?

Anyway the way I quit roms is that I press the xbox home button to go to retroarch then I press quick menu, close content, and then quit retroarch. I did try looking through retroarch to see if I could make select and start exit again but I have yet to find it. If someone has a tip please let me know.

meleu

@RedBatman based on what you said I believe that select isn't your "enable hotkey" button...

pjft

I had a few, most of them my fault. :)

One was when I bought a new USB drive for the ROMs and it started failing on me a few weeks later. It has now been sent for replacement, but the OCD frustration of having to get everything back exactly as it was wasn't nice - even though I have somewhat regular backups of my setup!

The other one was kind of related to this, but was on the development side. I was developing the work on Virtual Systems/Collections I sent a PR for earlier in the week, but when testing adding and removing games to the favorites list, the "remove" action was actually deleting the files from the folders, rather than just removing the entries in the gamelist.

Here I was, so happy organizing my list of favorites (add here, remove there, trim, etc) and at one point I noticed that a game I thought I had just removed from the list was nowhere to be found. Looking through the file system I found a save state for it, so there was some evidence that it had existed.

I suddenly realized what might have been happening, and I had deleted somewhere around 700+ ROMs by then.

Fun.

Thankfully I had a backup for this one.

The lats one was updating to 4.0 or 4.1 at the time, coming from a trimmed version of 3.6-3.7, it re-created the system folders for the emulators. As I had removed unused ones, this meant that ES was now starting with more systems than before. At the time I didn't connect the dots that this was a WSOD-type-of-behavior, but what was happening was that after the update ES would just load and then absolutely freeze. I was stumped. Not only that, but as my ROMs are in an external drive, restoring an image of my previous SD card on 3.6 and 3.7 was no longer working as well. I got scared, and even tried to read on whether the Pi had some firmware on the board that might have been updated, outside of the card.

Only by pure luck did I at one point manage to replicate the issue by adding a single extra system to a working setup, and then I knew that that was the cause for the freeze. I defaulted to carbon since then.

But other than that, things have been fairly straightforward - I only had my first contact with RetroPie when it was the 3.6-3.7 version, I believe, and it was an extremely solid, competently built package. I had no complaints with it. Most things worked as expected.

RedBatman

@meleu Oh then do you know how I can enable it, cause it has had me stumped for months.

meleu

@RedBatman When you configure input in emulationstation you have a chance to choose which button will be used to enable hotkey. If you really really really want to exit emulator with select+start, define the the select as "enable hotkey". Otherwise you can use the button you defined plus start to exit emulators.

pjft

"Months" wouldn't sound right - the explicit "hotkey" definition option was only added recently.

Furthermore, if you can access the RetroArch menu, you need to have some sort of hotkey defined, as it's supposed to be accessed via hotkey + X.

Have you tried pressing the XBox home button together with start?

cyperghost

Well I agree I cheated RetroPie with RecalBox for my little project the Pi zero in a Car monitor. It took my ages to give RecalBox CRT output. Then I setted the WIFI key (at this time RetroPie got the WIFI key via text file - easy nuff) and then all settings were gone because I did not remount the partion to write only and the RecalBox wouldn't boot again in graphics mode.

So I was fed up with this system... It is said it is SO easy to configure RecalBox but it's pure hell if you go to the innards of this system. I don't like the NOOBs loader maybe I'm such a NOOB that I NOOB the NOOBs loader.

After 6h of configurating I was back to a first boot level with RecalBox! So I went back to RetroPie!

As we see ES makes big steps ;) I think there is no need in changing to annother emulation system. RetroPie is all in all good setup without NOOBs

RedBatman

@pjft No I haven't I'll give that a try. I don't know why the xbox home button was made to open retroarch, buy honestly I kinds of prefer it. If I wanted to change the hotkey where should I go. I did configure my buttons in emulation station awhile back when first setting up my 360 controller.

RedBatman

@cyperghost Well when I first installed Retropie it was through command line on the Pixel/Raspian OS. My SD card came preinstalled with NOOBS. Didn't think NOOBS could cause people hassle.

backstander

When I first got RetroPie, I had a hard time getting my head around setting up MAME and understanding why different Arcade emulators needed different Romset. I had read the Wiki but I was still confused lol. The Wiki is great and has a lot of useful information but I guess I'd never had to deal with Romsets before.

Also I remember initially having trouble setting up Reicast/Dreamcast and getting it to work with my Xbox 360 controller. After searching many forums and trial n error I finally got it working so I updated the Wiki with my findings!
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Dreamcast

Now if something frustrates me, I'll just update the Wiki and hopefully that helps someone else in the future.

hooperre

Not immediately jumping to a USB for roms. Waiting forever for them to transfer to an SD (dreamcast, PSX, etc.) over WiFi. Losing my gameslist.xml files/custom rom pictures wayyyyyyy too frequently anytime I had to jump back to a previous backup. So many advantages to using a USB for roms.

Attempting to properly configure audio on Win 3.1x on DosBox and get it to recognize the 'audio' portion of the Civilization 2 CD.

Ongoing? Attempting to get my DS4 to have the correct deadzones with Reicast and some DosBox games. Attempting to get Playchoice-10 games to work in MAME or get rid of the top portion in AdvMAME so I can play Wild Gunman!

cyperghost

@RedBatman said in Your most frustrating moment?:

@cyperghost Well when I first installed Retropie it was through command line on the Pixel/Raspian OS. My SD card came preinstalled with NOOBS. Didn't think NOOBS could cause people hassle.

I think it makes people hassle if you want to change the /boot partition itself and you are working on a windows mashine without access to other partitions ;)

RedBatman

@hooperre If your using play choice 10 just use the nes emulators, it's what I did for castlevania.

lilbud

My biggest frustration was setting up retropie 2.6. Everything had to be done manually. Wifi setup? all done manually through an obscure file, etc/network/interfaces, and setup through there. Controller setup, command line. My point is that almost everything you wanted to do had to be done from the command line.

hooperre

@RedBatman AFAIK there's not a mouse setting for any of the LibRetro cores of the NES emulators so you can't use a Zapper. Has to be through MAME or AdvMAME for the time being. Sounds like there is an update coming soon that will change that, though.