Roms launching problem on Ubuntu Retropie setup

[Rave]

Hello,

(TL, DR: Roms hanging on grey/black screen on retropie installed on a linux laptop)

I hope this is not something already answered or too obvious as I don’t want to make people lose their time on this (in advance sorry). I did a bunch of research and to try to fix the problem myself but unfortunately didn’t manage.

My experience with Retropie is mainly based on Raspberry Pi project. I already setup and customize 3 Pi (2 x Pi3 and 1x Pi1) with Retropie and each time everything worked well with a little bit of customization as the process is pretty easy and well documented.

Now I found myself jumping for a new little project. Use a small laptop (Samsung N150 plus) with linux and turn it into a Retropie setup that is more easy to use “on the go” as all equipment is integrated (battery, screen, keyboard, speaker,…).

The system is not really powerfull but for basic retro gaming I was thinking to give it a try.

System:

• Intel Atom N450 1.66 GHz
• 2 GB DDR2 RAM (changed from original 1 GB)
• Inel SSD 160 GB (changed from original 250 GB Samsung 5400 rpm)
• Display max resolution 1024 x 600

I installed Linux Mint 18 sarah XFCE 32bit (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) and followed the official documentation (https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroPie-Ubuntu-16.04-LTS-x86-Flavor/) to download and install Retropie.
It took a bunch of minutes to download the package but no problem on this side.
Then I launched the setup script and perform the Basic install. Here it took several hours (about 5-6) but I read that it was normal as the script was compiling every emulator one by one and given that the laptop itself is not a War machine I just let it go. The installation finished with few errors related to MAME it seems (but at this point I decided to ignore as I don’t really plan to use it for MAME game anyway).

I launched emulationstation and configure the keyboard as input.

I copied few NES Roms to do a first test and after a restart the Nintendo logo appear and I saw my Roms.

Now here is the issue, when launching any Roms the prompt “press A button” appear correctly during few second and then Grey screen.
From this grey screen I can’t come back to the main menu with START + SELECT so I can just come back to the desktop and kill the process.

I did some test with other system (SNES, SEGA Megadrive) and had a similar problem (excepted that the screen is black and not grey).

As the Rom were in .zip (as on my Pi) I tried to unzip them to have them as “.nes” etc,… but same issue.

I tried to dig a little bit on the forum and google and even if other people reported issue when launching Roms, it was not really helpful as not reported from the linux installation.

I’m not a linux guru but I assume I could manage my way if somebody point me in the good direction.

If more information like log or other are necessary I’ll be happy to share if you can let me know what is needed.

I was thinking checking the .cfg file to see if anything could jump to my head but for now nothing (could have think about a resolution problem) ?

Hope somebody has any idea and in advance thanks for any information or input you could share with me.

Kind regards

PS: Sorry for my “~english”