New "Black Screen of Death"

hansolo77

Yes I'm at 100 VRAM.
How do I get and install one of the binaries?

pjft

@hansolo77 in the thread you previously posted at, there should have been a link in the first post about how to install them. What build were you on beforehand? Version number?

hansolo77

I'm not sure actually. I just blindly updated. :(

pjft

@hansolo77 :)

OK.

What Pi are you on? Pi 3, I believe?

Could you do the following: after returning from a game and getting that black screen, could you exit emulationstation and check what's the content of

~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt

?

Could you send it over?

I'm actually not on my pi at the moment, as I'm traveling for work today, but I'm thinking there may have been a new change just this weekend that may be causing this.

@TMNTturtlguy could you - or anyone else - update from source and test the same steps? It might be that this actually is more widespread after this weekend.

TMNTturtlguy

@hansolo77 so I put just tested out my theory about you running out of memory due to "too many video files causing you to run out of memory". I created a system with 150 videos at 320x240 and then I copied that multiple times in es_systems. At 10 systems I ran ok, at 16 systems I started having issues with the video and other md_images not showing up on exit. If i back out to the main system screen and go back into the game select menu they are back. At 18 systems I started having a bigger slow down in performance than expected. Then I ran this same test on another pi with another sd card. I noticed much less slowdown, but at 18 systems the meta data images still loaded slower. All of my tests were using the comic book theme running a VRAM of 100, no overclocking, omx video player, videos at 320x240 @ 30fps.

I wonder if you would be kind enough to create a copy of your es_systems.cfg file and reduce the number of systems you are loading to test performance.

Edit just to clarify I did not update from source to test this, and I am just leaving home, so can't test now. Also note that he @hansolo77 has been having these issue prior to the updates pushed this weekend. I and others have been replying to multiple posts since Thursday or Friday. Thanks

hansolo77

I will attempt to start this all over again. I'm still in the process of reducing the resolution of my videos. But I decided rather than try to fix this, I'll go back a few steps. I'm having another issue (unrelated to the black screen, rebuilding the kernel caused the raphnet north-west drift to return). So I restored from an SD card backup I made back in February when things were mostly working. I'm going to try doing an update to the installed packages WITHOUT updating the kernel. There might be something that got updated there that broke it.

As it is right now, restoring the backup has made everything go back to working. This was an image I made prior to scraping for videos, and obtaining a version of EmulationStation and Carbon themes that supported it. It works like the way it did before, static images, games load and return to ES just fine. Once I finish updating, I'll test again. I made a backup of my gamelist.xml files to a temp folder on my computer so I can restore them with the modified locations of the videos.

TMNTturtlguy

@hansolo77 this sounds like a great solution! After updating to the latest ES from source I might suggest you add videos to just one system first and see how it runs. Then add videos to systems one system at a time. Doing this will help determine if your build hits a certain threshold of video data it can handle. Keep us posted and good luck!

hansolo77

Success!!

It's definitely something in the underlying kernel that, upon updating, breaks whatever fixes were implemented into EmulationStation. I just went through a system-wide "update all installed packages", then moved over my backed up gamelists and videos. Then I went in and updated EmulationStation from source (the binary is still the previous version without the OMX player), and updated the Carbon theme. Rebooted. All videos show up fine, in full res, playing a game and returning to EmulationStation now works without a black screen. I will test a bit more, but it looks solved!

Lesson/Solution - Don't update the kernel.

TMNTturtlguy

@hansolo77 great! Glad to hear.

hansolo77

Now all I have to do is find a pretty theme I like rather than the nasty black Carbon.