Occasional Black Screen after Splash Screen. Sound Still Works

[A Bored Ninja]

Here's my setup:

Pi Model: 3b+
Power Supply used: PWR+ 3.5 Amp Power Supply
RetroPie Version Used: 4.4
Built From: Stock Retropie 4.4 from official site
USB Devices connected: None
Controller used: 8bitbdo SN30 Pro
Error messages received: None
How to replicate the problem: Sporadic.

I'm having an issue with my Retropie setup randomly going into a black screen after it boots.

It is otherwise running properly because the sound still works in the background. As a matter of fact, I can even blindly pick a game and I'll hear the sound from that.

When I go to reset the Pi, I'll get a brief glimpse of the correct screen. Typically upon reboot it functions properly and doesn't go black during gameplay ever.

This occurs completely randomly and gives no error message.

I have seen a few reports of the Drastic emulator (which I have installed) causing black screen issues, but no one specified if they were on boot. I do get the same black screen with mouse pointer everyone gets when leaving Drastic. I'm not worried about that.

Any help diagnosing this issue would be greatly appreciated. I have dozens of hours in this 200gb image and would hate to have to start over from scratch.

[A Bored Ninja]

Update.

I rebuilt my 200gb image again this weekend from my perfectly working 128gb image.

Only changes were adding arcade games and rescraping everything with Skyscraper.

I also updated Retroarch and Emulationstation.

The same issue has occurred.

I no longer have Drastic on the build since I started over so I know that isn't it.

I only have 4gb left on the image. Would low storage cause this?

Any insight would be appreciated.

[mitu]

@A-Bored-Ninja said in Occasional Black Screen after Splash Screen. Sound Still Works:

I only have 4gb left on the image. Would low storage cause this?

Could be, the filesystem usually reserves 5% to the root user so that a regular user wouldn't be able to crash the system by filling up the disk.

Can you look in the Emulationstation log file - /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt and see if it has any errors ? Post the log file here and also your /boot/config.txt file.

[hhromic]

@mitu said in Occasional Black Screen after Splash Screen. Sound Still Works:

Could be, the filesystem usually reserves 5% to the root user so that a regular user wouldn't be able to crash the system by filling up the disk.

Interesting, never heard of that before in Linux. Can you point me to some resource to read about it? Thanks!

EDIT: aaah you meant the ext* filesystem reserved blocks? E.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ext4#Reserved_blocks
I know about it indeed, I thought it was space reserved for internal inodes data, not actual user data (owned by root). Every day you learn something new :)
EDIT2: there is also a reserved area for the internal inodes too, hence my confusion.

[A Bored Ninja]

@mitu said in Occasional Black Screen after Splash Screen. Sound Still Works:

@A-Bored-Ninja said in Occasional Black Screen after Splash Screen. Sound Still Works:

I only have 4gb left on the image. Would low storage cause this?

Could be, the filesystem usually reserves 5% to the root user so that a regular user wouldn't be able to crash the system by filling up the disk.

Can you look in the Emulationstation log file - /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_log.txt and see if it has any errors ? Post the log file here and also your /boot/config.txt file.

@mitu I will definitely get those logs to you later today! I didn't know about the 5% that needed to be kept open.

I wonder if deleting the cache that skyscraper has stored would free up enough space? I do have about 10,000 videos on there now...

[A Bored Ninja]

@mitu It was definitely a storage issue.

I deleted the Skyscraper cache, and it freed up over 40gb of storage!

The issue is now gone.

Thanks for your help!