no emulators work properly from emulation station menu

linux_jim

I have installed retroarch, emulation station and retropie on ubuntu 14.04. i named the user pi when i did the install to try to simplify installing retropie. I used the ppa installers from retroarch and emilation station. then i ran "git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git" and installed retropie. i originally used retropie on my raspberrypi and got hooked, so I decided to build a pc becasue the pi had trouble with N64 and because i wanted to try to get ps2 emulator working since a have over 100 ps2 games but my ps2 is held together with tape and glue. i'm still trying to wrap my head around what roles retroarch, emulation station and retropie play. so before i installed retropie i tested and ran games with retroarch and emulation station. then I added retropie. with retropie if i have a line like this "<command>retroarch -L /usr/lib/libretro/mupen64plus_libretro.so %ROM%</command>" in my es_system.cfg i can load games and the launch from emulation station. but if i put "<command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 SYS n64 %ROM%</command>" in my es_systems.cfg i try to launch games and nothing happens and it comes right back to the emulationstation menu. the same thing happens with the retropie menu items, such as bluetooth and wifi config menus. if i look in the es_log i can see the command it trys to run. if i cut and paste it out of the es_log and run from the command line it works great, the N64 games work flawlessly. Has anyone seen this issue before?

linux_jim

Here are the exact commands I used to install on a fresh ubuntu install. I had previously used the same steps to install a ubuntu 14.04. and a 16.04 VM and had the same issue on both.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libretro/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install retroarch retroarch-* libretro-*

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:emulationstation/ppa -y

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install emulationstation-theme-simple emulationstation

sudo apt-get install -y git dialog unzip xmlstarlet

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git

cd RetroPie-Setup

sudo ./retropie_setup.sh

BuZz

RetroPie is not designed to be mixed with 3rd party ppa etc. Why are you not using the RetroPie packages etc?

linux_jim

is it not neccessary to install retroarch and emulationstation before retropie? or should I just run the below commands on a clean install?

sudo apt-get install -y git dialog unzip xmlstarlet

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git

cd RetroPie-Setup

sudo ./retropie_setup.sh

BuZz

@linux_jim Did you follow the official instructions ? https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroPie-Ubuntu-16.04-LTS-x86-Flavor/

BuZz

Note that if you have installed Emulation Station and RetroArch manually you may want to remove the old configs before install from

~/.config/retroarch
~/.emulationstation
/etc/emulationstation

BuZz

BTW you should probably update to Ubuntu 16.04 (or later) - RetroPie is no longer tested with 14.04 and some things may not work.

linux_jim

i did a clean install of 16.04 and then ran the below commands. I also set the pi user to sudo with no password per the install instructions. At first i didnt think it worked because there are no icons for retroarch or emulation station, but i just ran emulation station from the command line and it worked. then i set it to start on login, much better that way. i copied some roms over and tried a few and everything seems to work. Thanks for the help BuZz!!!

These are the install commands:
sudo apt-get install -y git dialog unzip xmlstarlet
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git
cd RetroPie-Setup
sudo ./retropie_setup.sh