I've been testing a few things and found that two things help.

A full update seemed to fix the usbmount service failing to start. (Could be coincidental. I will advise if it turns out to be bad advice) sudo apt update sudo apt full-upgrade sudo reboot

UPDATE : Confirmed AOK. Occasionally I see the logs fly by with a red usbmount service failure, but within 2 seconds there is a matching line stating the usbmount service is up and running. All good.

It seems that the root cause of the extensive time delay to launch ES is ES searching the roms folders to see if there have been any new roms added. https://github.com/jrassa/EmulationStation/blob/master/GAMELISTS.md indicates that once I am happy with my roms I can change how ES is launched by using the switch --gamelist-only to skip automatic searching, and only display games defined in the system's gamelist.xml. Will update shortly after I've done some testing.

UPDATE: --gamelist-only switch works perfectly. Can also be set by entering RetroPie's Main menu > Other > and enabling Parse Gamelists Only. I can now have thousands of roms on the attached USB drive and ES loads in a few seconds. :-)

@hsus I doubt it, and why update if everything works as you would like? I haven’t updated my builds in a year or so. Too afraid some game (especially arcade) may just stop working.

@huhogany Hi. where do i even find that line /opt/retropie....etc, etc? I am so lost and confused. Do I look for it on pc or use the pi4 gui screen? i have no idea where to find this. Is it a command line?

UPDATE: I got it to work. What I did...

Updated post fixes in vman 512 image... reboot
options
system tools
audio settings
set audio output to headphones

@chicuelo Thank you! Your Dark the is brilliant by the way, thanks so much for making it available for us all! I made one tiny change - swapped the Amiga character art for one I made by editing the box art for Putty (I used to love that game!):
amiga-min.jpg

Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing whatever you might do next! 😊

Mark

@mpnuttall Sorry, I don't have any experience with such large files on Github. But Git Large File Storage (git-lfs) could be what you need:

https://git-lfs.github.com/

https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-large-files/versioning-large-files

@mitu not until now, let's see if it works!

@sirhenrythe5th (…and others having issues with random custom splash screen videos)

After freshly upgrading to the latest retropi image on both my pi3b+ and my pi4, I ran into this issue again and had to add one more step.

After appending all the desired videos to the list (separate folders in the ‘opt/retropi/supplementary/splashscreen’ folder), disable the randomizer if it is already enabled, enable the randomizer, and select ‘Randomize /etc/splash screens.list’. Now when I reboot both the pi3 and pi4, a random splashscreen plays properly every time.

I did try this with the splash screens placed in /home/pi/retropie/splashscreens but could not get it to work reliably no matter what I did. This is likely due to me having retropie on an sdcard and roms on a usb drive… the usb is often not ready early enough in the boot process for the videos to work. No mods to autostart.sh etc worked either. If you are doing full usb boot, it will probably work keeping the videos in your home splashscreen folder (moving them to the opt supplementary folder is more work anyways).

@herb_fargus Yes! I love your splash screen.

@jackiehanna Dude, this is just another in a long line of issues you're having because of the power supply you're using.

Please, just go and buy a proper one like you've been advised multiple times. It'll save you, and the forum members lots of hassle.

Thanks Mitu!!

It seems that adding/enabling these lines in the config.txt fixes the problem

sdtv_mode=2 #My tv is PAL
sdtv_aspect=1 #4:3
audio_pwm_mode=0
dtparam=audio=on (this one is enabled by default)

@clyde worked like a charm... now just have to fine tune it

Thanks

Cool! I was just curious. It is great as it is. I guess if I had to choose a company that represented Raspberry Pi the best, it'd be Adafruit.

And not to hi-jack your thread, but if anyone want's a PS2 version,

okay i have mode you script a bit
im using ubuntu 19-04 x64
make a folder named splashscreens in $HOME/RetroPie and put all your videos in that folder
put this in you script
chmod 755 you script

this script plays a random video form this folder and load emulation station
the only isuse i have whit this is it show a little splash screen on top of video that emulation station is load-et, but it diapers ;)

#!/bin/bash #hides the menubar and desktop #gnome-terminal --full-screen --hide-menubar #starts Retropie gnome-terminal --full-screen --hide-menubar -- emulationstation & #Plays video in VLC then exits. Replace quoted part with your video's location. vlc --random --play-and-stop --play-and-exit --fullscreen --video-on-top --no-video-title-show "$HOME/RetroPie/splashscreens" exit

Hi! I'm having the same problem. Did you solved that?