After an evening of pondering this, I have figured out what I did to screw it up. I have created multiple images of RetroPie setups that were reasonably customized and saved piles of things I referred to as "Clean" associated with those. (For example, known good ROMS, BIOS, and Meta Data like Scraper results.) What happened was that I missed a step trying to recreate my steps. So here's the abbreviated version of what I did that messed it up. Wrote the correct, unaltered, unupdated 4.5.1 image to the SD card (I really couldn't believe I would have written the wrong image). Copied vast amounts of "Clean" altered configs (for a setup that was designed for SNES controller compatibility, and thus didn't use PSX). Boomie. (At this point, I believe my copying of configs was all it took to scramble it up.) It should have been obvious when the pixel art launch screens came up (part of the config I just copied), but I honestly recall thinking "Oh cool, 4.5.1 uses the same pixel art things I liked for launching games." Thus, to your point, I had 4.5.1, with a bunch of 4.4 config wedged in manually after the fact. Worse, because my previously configured system never used PSX (not enough RasPi power when I created it, and not enough buttons when using SNES controllers), I had no idea that there might have been a bug with it that had been hiding in what I was copying. Thanks for the feedback.

@MaMikee Use runcommand configuration and change Launch menu to disabled. I also disable Launch menu art and disable Launch menu Joystick control. It should just boot cleanly into your game from emulationstation.

@mitu I'm using 4.4. I have not reset config from the retroarch gui. Controls work fine in the retroarch menu as well. This problem has had me stumped for awhile.

@mitu no because LEDSpicer is linear, he need a matrix, I have another project called LCDSpicer (LOL?) that may work, but long time I don't touching that code and I don't remember where I left that project.

@obliv Please add more info about your system, as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first. How are you trying to open the launch options ?

Will P4 64x32 panels work as well? I only have a space 23x5.5 and the P4's would be a better fit. This looks like a great application!

@mitu Of cours, but then you mess up your rom set. On the other hand some systems or naming conventions use rom sets which have names which are not unique. (I don't find one at the moment, but i saw such discs) e.g. "<Game>.cue" "Track1.bin" "Track2.bin"

@mitu Oh, ok. Thanks. I thought the emulators.cfg just covered the emulator/core used generally for that particular system, and didn't deal with individual roms.

It worked, Thankyou

I didn't search for "dialog box" because I thought that was called the "launch menu."

@Texacate Thanks...I kinda hit a brick wall and walked away for this particular project for a while. Just overthinking and making it too complicated. I did, however, use your code to make LCD Marquee. Found a 14.9" stretched monitor and added to my Arcade1up mod. But I will get back to the original idea in the New Year. Have some other projects I need to finish up and will revisit this one.

@mitu I actually figured it out late last night. As I was trying every game file I thought that there had to be something wrong with how the images were being called up. I looked again at both my es_systems.cfg & emulators.cfg and realized that I had it pointing to pcengine not pcenginecd. I must have looked at those ten times without realizing my mistake. I knew I was doing something stupid. I guess I really should have stepped away from it for a bit.

Just add the full path to the script in the .sh file and make sure it's executable.

@John_RM_70 Try one command at a time and see which ones locks up the Pi. It's probably tvservice, but it could be because of the previous command, which specifies might specify an invalid mode. Have you tried tvservice -p (preferred mode) ?

@Kaydenmario8 Depending on the emulator, some use 480p by default and you can't change it I think. There are two different resolution, one for render and one for output.

@Brigane Actually they didn't stop - there was an update in August (see this topic). There's hope that one day it might be open sourced.

@BuZz thanks man!

@mitu Thanks! I was about ready to download a fresh image just to see if onstart would be there

@mitu Thanks for that. It worked perfectly. It is actually great news that the boxart splash screen is a separate location and separate file. It means I can create a specific "help" splash screen with the boxart and button mappings so that when I start a game it reminds me how to play the game.