Emulation, menu freezes sometimes for a few seconds when USB drive is present

cebix

Hello.

RPI3B+
2.5A 5V power supply
Retropie 4.4 with all updates installed as of today
Built from retropie-4.4-rpi2_rpi3.img
USB Devices connected: 16GB NTFS GoodRAM pendrive, keyboard
Kingston 64GB SD card
Errors: [FAILED] failed to start usbmount@dev-sda.service

Just bought a Rpi 3b+ and installed retropie. It's my first time with any of these. I put some NES and PSX roms on my USB drive and connected it to the PI with official instructions (wait till it stops blinking, pull out the drive, insert roms, etc.). Running fine for a minute or two then the screen would freeze for a few seconds then run again then freeze and so on. Meanwhile sound is playing fine. Also happens in the menus after that. I don't even know when the PI transferred the roms from the USB drive but it did it on its own... When I unplugged the drive everything works great.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

mitu

How are you using the USB drive - to transfer the ROMs to the PI or to run ROMs from it ? When you say sound is playing fine - what are you referring to ?

cebix

I thought I was running the roms from the USB but it seems that the PI transferred them by itself in the background or when booting, because I didn't copy them manually and all my games are on there without the USB. The sound is playing fine means that the game continues to move forward while the screen is stuck on a frame for a second or two and when it resumes, it does not from the point when the screen froze but from those few seconds later. Say if you turned your head away from the TV and played from memory you wouldn't notice anything happened. Hope that clears it a little. Also that error I get I get everytime I boot the system with the USB plugged in. Without it there's no error.

But the problem is even if the games are being played from the SD (I suppose) and the USB drive is in just doing nothing it will still freeze on me.

dankcushions

yeah, that USB behaviour is the standard. if you want to run from USB you have to set it up as so: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/

i believe that error message isn't neccesarily indicative of a problem.

your freezing issue sounds like a power or temperature issue - do you get any thermometer or lightning symbols in the corner whilst playing?

cebix

@dankcushions No indication of overhearing or low power. Without the USB plugged in it runs fine all day without a single freeze.

dankcushions

@cebix hmm, i suppose you could investigate dmesg to see if there's some usb errors, unless it's still transferring/attempting to transfer something.

is there any reason you want the USB plugged in if you've already transferred everything, though?

cebix

@dankcushions Not really, I don't need the USB plugged in. Seems like a curious issue though and it took me a while to isolate the problem source. I need to read a tutorial on how to get those logs out since I have 0 Linux experience. I'll upload these later today if I figure it out.

cebix

@dankcushions Here's my pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/NR8ixXeM

If anybody sees anything interesting in there please let me know. I can't figure anything out in this file sadly.

I don't know if it's of any interest but I plugged in my USB pendrive, ran RetroPie, hit F4 to exit EmuStation, ran the command dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.txt, ran emulationstation, played a PSX game which froze pretty much instantly, exited the game, took the file via WinSCP and there it is.