Update: Since editing Retropie's runcommand.sh is a dirty hack that can be reverted any time if this file is being updated by the developers, here's a way to use the runcommand-onstart.sh instead. One way to edit this file is the command nano /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh. Add this at its end: launchpic="$(dirname ${3})/images/launching/$(basename $3 .zip)-launching.png" fbi -1 -t 12 -noverbose -a "$launchpic" </dev/tty &>/dev/null & The first line will change the path and filename of the game's rom to that of the launch image. The second line invokes Retropie's framebuffer picture viewer like runcommand.sh does, albeit with a trailing & that runs it as a background process so it doesn't pause the loading of the game. The above solution assumes that your launch images reside in a sub-subdirectory images/launching in your rom directory, e.g. /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/arcade/images/launching. However this will create a strange behavior of the keyboard's Enter key in the emulator, which is especially annoying in MAME's Tab menu: Pressing Enter will either exit the Emulator or do other strange things like running Emulation Station a second time. It seems like another terminal is running in the background that reacts to the keyboard inputs in the running game. (?) I don't understand why simply running the image viewer as a background task will create this behaviour. Alas, and contrary to my last post, & disown will not fix it. After nearly two hours of research and testing, I'm giving up. My current workaround and recommendation is to use the first controller's button that also starts games in Emulation Station instead of the Enter key in MAME's Tab menu. It works without problems for me. If anyone can explain why putting fbi in the background leads to problems with the Enter key in at least RetroArch's MAME cores, or why using nohup doesn't display the image at all, and even with fbi's options -T and -d to choose a particular terminal or framebuffer, please share your wisdom with me and anyone else interested here.

@mitu that's true. thank you very much

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.

here's a couple projects I've done with an LED matrix marquee RetroPie based ==>https://www.instructables.com/id/Vertical-Bartop-Arcade-With-Integrated-PIXEL-LED-D/ PC Based ==>https://www.instructables.com/id/Arcade-Machine-With-Changing-LED-Marquee/ Here's a guide for setting up this LED marquee and RetroPie ==>http://ledpixelart.com/files/retropie/ . Runcommand onstart and onend is used here. When a new game is launched, a script runs which passes the rom name to the LED marquee software (http://pixelcade.org) which is then displayed on the panels. Both still image PNGs and GIF animations can be displayed by game. This project also includes artwork that has been manually re-mastered for 128x32 for that classic 8-bit look. Disclaimer, I'm the creator for this project and sell these as kits.

@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 ?

@Davelusa yes P4 should be fine, I'm actually doing a Street Fighter cab conversion to an LED marquee and P4 is the best fit for that. Hit me up and I can send you some pics on how it turned out. Here also is a recent Bartop project I did https://www.instructables.com/id/Arcade-Machine-With-Changing-LED-Marquee/ . That one is PC based and has a nice feature unfortunately only available on the PC where the marquee will change also when scrolling through games and emulators on the front end.

@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."

I had to edit the Joy2Key.py file to allow the user of the Start button so the player could exit the screen using the Player 1 button. What line would you have to edit

@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!