@mitu Thanks. Didn’t work though. Updated Skyscraper, recreated the gamelist, installed the Daphne emulator, rebooted: the ES fails to boot, same error code.

OK, here are some final words:

I tried reinstalling Daphne and Ports emulators, which did nothing I wiped the SD card and started over.

After that, I attempted an experiment: with the RPi shiny and new, I changed the resolution with Raspi-Config and rebooted. The EmulationStation never came back. Apparently, in my case, changing the RetroPie resolution is a death sentence. For any reason, you'll never see your ES again.

Case closed.