@mitu thanks, I've edited my post to just leave the systems I'm having trouble with. They all point to the 'parent' system.

EDIT: I changed the name for naomi from dreamcast and it's working.. So problem solved. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

@Mark_McQ ahhh, the memories of loading games from tape...

Loved a bit of Odd Job Eddie on the ZX!

@sterpa up...thanks

Hey - raspberry pi 3b+ here - i was getting crackling when I plugged in my monster bluetooth speaker in via audio jack (it also had an audio jack). Then tried very old computer speakers, no crackling...not sure if this will help you at all, but worth noting in this thread.

@BuZz editing /opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand.cfg did the trick, thankyou! :-)

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

Either that or just disable the video - what good is a 5 seconds video ?

SOLVED

All I had to do was delete my recently uploaded splash screens through samba and reboot.. I guess you need to save video splash screen files a certain (unknown) way before you transfer

Most likely the USB stick is not 'mounted' (therefore inaccessible) when the splashscreen starts, so the video cannot be read and the splashscreen fails. Copying it to /opt/retropi.. will copy the splashscreen on the SD card, which is immediately available on boot.

@kristjan1111 As other services started on boot, the splashscreen has to wait until the system is minimally start before it can start. Since the splashscreen image/videos are on your local disk, there's nothing that can be done before the disk check is complete.
I remember that there was a bug on RPI's related to fake-hwclock that would make the disk check trigger every boot - https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=198937&start=25 - so try to run a system update and see if it fixes the long boot time.

its a bug ... after each update, you will need to go to the spashscreen settings and make sure to change them to whatever it was already set to and the problem will be solved.

@lilbud great splash and a phenominal show. The spin off, Better Call Saul, ain’t too bad either if you haven’t checked that yet.

@ericbsmith42 thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for. Adding --vol -3000 to the omxplayer string lowered the volume to a much more reasonable level.

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Huh. Now that's weird.

I tried what you described (thank you very much for that!), and while the script works like a charm, for some reason fbi fails to load the 1920x1200 splashscreen. It literally returns a black screen with

/home/pi/RetroPie/splashscreens/retropie-extra/rookervik-pixel-16x10.png: loading FAILED

written at the bottom. The weirdest thing is that if I run

sudo fbi -T 2 -once -t 20 -noverbose -a -l /etc/splashscreen.list >/dev/null 2>&1

after start up, mimicking the syntax in /opt/retropie/supplementary/splashscreen/asplashscreen.sh, the image is shown normally!

So close, yet so far! Any ideas?

EDIT: UN-FREAKING-BELIEVABLE! That was happening because I’m using USB auto-mount for loading roms into the system. For some reason, that option also overwrites the splash screens directory, but the pendrive is only mounted AFTER the splash screen is actually shown on startup. Hence, when I moved the stretched image into the directory, I was actually moving into the pendrive, which is ignored by the Pi on startup! All I had to do was unmount the pendrive, copy the file into the SD card and it worked! 😁 Thank you very much once again for all the help!