Keyboard stops working on assertion fail

[CheshireKatt]

I've run into a situation (two, actually, but more on that in a bit) where my keyboard (usb wired) doesn't work (and my only available option is to pull the power on the pi so I can restart it, nothing else I do works).

This occurs after I receive an assertion failure when selecting a specific rom in EmulationStation. I'm not launching the rom, I'm just moving the selection in EmulationStation to that rom. That causes it to drop completely out of EmulationStation to the console. The specific assertion displayed is:

emulationstation: /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/emulationstation/es-core/src/resources/Font.cpp:129: static UnicodeChar Font::readUnicodeChar(const string&, std::size_t&): Assertion '(c ^ 0xC0) != 0x80' failed.
Aborted

Below that, it shows the RetroPie ascii joystick, system state information, and the console prompt, complete with blinking cursor. But I can't do anything with it because my keyboard no longer works.

I also end up in a case where the keyboard does nothing when I go into the "press any button to configure the emulator" options screen once I have launched an emulator, the keyboard is non-functional there as well.

This is on a stock Raspberry Pi 3b. No overclocking or manual configuration tweaks except adjusting the save paths to my auto-mounted (via retropie-mount) USB stick. I'm using the correct version of RetroPie 4.2 for the Pi 3, and have had no issues outside these cases. Roms play fine, the keyboard works fine and dandy in retropie-config, and if I exit out of EmulationStation to a command prompt it works there too. I've installed Linapple and Reicast via retropie-config, if somehow that matters.

I've done the basic steps of ensuring the retropie setup script is updated, and updating all of the installed packages, with no change. I haven't been able to find any solutions online to this -- the only mentions of keyboard issues I've found seem to be more the case of "someone has installed the wrong RetroPie version, or has a bad SD and they're just crashing after startup", which is not what I have at all.

Anyways, that's my long-winded problem detail. :)

[jazzsunn]

I know this is 4 months old, but no one responded, and I have the exact same problem. Was there a fix for this?

[jonnykesh]

@jazzsunn What theme are you using in ES? Looking at it quickly tells me there is an issue with the font in a certain theme. Change your theme.

Edit: In fact change your theme then remove the theme and reinstall it again if you want to use it.

[jonnykesh]

@jazzsunn Or failing that, not even your theme. Check your ROM names for non ASCII characters. Remove anything odd or unusual from the file names.