The easiest method is to modify cgenius.cfg and replace

OpenGL = true

in the [Video] section with

OpenGL = false

@mitu yes that did it.
its kinda funny i thought i did change it to false before. oh well i have it working now. thank you

Ah thanks. I was intending to use the Commander Genius loading screen to download the freeware games, but I'll try installing them myself.

There's a bug in the stock Debian compiler which causes a build error; see #2099 and #2074.
@herb_fargus ^

Compilation apparently fails with a segfault:

https://github.com/gerstrong/Commander-Genius/issues/258

Reported again here today:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/56c9yl/commander_genius/

Reproducing on RetroPie 4.0.2, the problem is a GCC segfault:

[ 93%] Building CXX object src/fileio/CMakeFiles/fileio.dir/CPatcherUtils.cpp.o In file included from /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/cgenius/src/engine/keen/galaxy/common/ai/platform/CVarPlatform.cpp:8:0: /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/cgenius/src/engine/keen/galaxy/common/ai/platform/CVarPlatform.h: In member function ‘virtual void galaxy::CVarPlatform::_ZTv0_n112_N6galaxy12CVarPlatform9serializeER19CSaveGameController(CSaveGameController&)’: /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/cgenius/src/engine/keen/galaxy/common/ai/platform/CVarPlatform.h:37:10: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault void serialize(CSaveGameController &savedGame) ^ Please submit a full bug report, with preprocessed source if appropriate. See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.9/README.Bugs> for instructions.

We're a few versions behind on cgenius, but the same occurs with the latest stable (v183):

[ 97%] Building CXX object src/engine/keen/galaxy/CMakeFiles/engine_keen_galaxy.dir/common/ai/platform/CPlatformSit.cpp.o In file included from /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/cgenius/src/engine/keen/galaxy/common/ai/platform/CVarPlatform.cpp:8:0: /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/cgenius/src/engine/keen/galaxy/common/ai/platform/CVarPlatform.h: In member function ‘virtual void galaxy::CVarPlatform::_ZTv0_n112_N6galaxy12CVarPlatform9serializeER19CSaveGameController(CSaveGameController&)’: /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/cgenius/src/engine/keen/galaxy/common/ai/platform/CVarPlatform.h:37:10: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault void serialize(CSaveGameController &savedGame) ^ Please submit a full bug report, with preprocessed source if appropriate. See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.9/README.Bugs> for instructions.

Someone else got it to compile by changing build flags, but the result was not good:

https://github.com/gerstrong/Commander-Genius/issues/254#issuecomment-241711960

Seems this is a limitation of Jessie's older GCC and an update limitation is imposed by older glibc:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools/issues/61

We could resolve this by cross-compiling with a newer GCC somewhere else and providing binaries which cannot be rebuilt directly on the Pi.

According to OP, upstream v17x compiled okay, we could try downgrade RetroPie's port and forever stay on the old version.

@BuZz any thoughts?