Oh wait. You are using Raspbian Jessie.

It's no longer supported. It says this when you launch RetroPie-Setup. You will need to start from a RetroPie 4.4 based image.

Maybe I should have disabled the update mechanism, but I hoped the message saying no longer supported would be enough rather than forcing/removing functionality.

@pfoff The error is a very generic one and it's unlikely it's something related to SDL, looks like there's a problem with your system. Check dmesg for any related errors - especially hardware ones.
With only 2Gb or RAM, you'd better off using the 32bit version of the OS, you won't gain very much with a 64 bit system. Also, on PC all packages are built from source, so there's no need to re-compile manually any package.

Hi evryone and thanks for all the hard work,
I had the audio bug too (sound was really garbled) until I (apt) install libsdl2-ttf-dev and modify my
RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/emulators/amiberry.sh to go with SDL2
and update from source.

@rc_cola
Once when I experienced problems with cd tracks on psx games, I experimented with different audio drivers. If you dig more and search the web, you will find some different opinions. I think one of the audio driver will synchronize with video and if you get frame drops or anything else can't keep it up, then audio starts to stutter. Changing the driver did resolve this problem, if i remember right. The audio wasn't no longer synchronized, but it sounded without problems and I couldn't tell anything wrong with it. It was only happening with cd tracks. So, in short, this could be one of the tradeoffs. I have no more details about this, sorry.

Btw, you may find more information if you search about these topics in generell, like sdl vs alsa. These are common in Linux. And just in case you missed this page:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sound-Issues/ Note, they speak about older Raspberry Pi versions on this page.

It's fine to downgrade. Shipped SDL2 should be fine on your system.

@war3zlod3r How about checking the news and the download page ?

I edited
scriptmodules/helpers.sh: local own_sdl2=1
to
scriptmodules/helpers.sh: local own_sdl2=0

This just uses the default sdl2 installed on the system. Seems to work ok

I solved this myself by just installing LXDE on RetroPie. Might be good to know for other projects though.

Or we can just wait until 2.4.32 arrives. Perhaps in one month?