Solution for " White Screen of Death "

herb_fargus

@MWGemini and the rest of the community as well :) I wish I had more free time to test all these changes!

MWGemini

@herb_fargus I wish I had more free time too! That's part of what I like about this community (and open source in general)- with a little cooperation, a lot of cool stuff can get accomplished (things none of us could've done alone, or at least not nearly as easily).

Nismo

I only want to say thank you to all people working on this project, starting from @fieldofcows for his great job, @Zigurana for his ideas and development on carrousel, @MWGemini for his testing, (I don't have an rpi, so sorry so much because i can't help there), and everybody making this possible.

Never seen a coopertive work like in this forum, it's amazing.

Also I want to say sorry so much to @herb_fargus for missunderstanding him one post on another thread (sorry for the offtopic) but i need to say this.

Regards to all.

fieldofcows

And @Nismo, thank you for your theme development, suggestions and feature testing. ** Group Hug ** Haha!

Now how are we going to get your a RPi?

fieldofcows

So the test build has been hanging around for a while and a few people have tried it. I would still be happier if more people could try this before it's merged in because it's a big change.

For anyone with C++ experience, please take a look at the commit diff: https://github.com/fieldofcows/EmulationStation/commit/454473224240b3106d7f14fcff9f2d30e2e771b3

I've given this a good amount of testing on RPi3 but I only have configurations that I have setup for testing - I haven't got a 'real' configured system to try it on. As far as I'm aware, nobody has tried RPi2 or RPi1 yet.

I'll give RPi1 a go in a minute. I'm not 100% sure it will cope well with the dynamic textures but as long as it doesn't break the previous functionality where a theme fits in memory then I think we're ok.

If it all looks good I'll submit the PR.

**Scannigan**

@fieldofcows said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

@MWGemini said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

Do you happen to have installation steps for your latest patch handy?

Borrowed from my previous instructions on the Video Preview thread:

Installation instructions:

Download a fresh copy of retropie from https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/releases/download/4.1/retropie-4.1-rpi2_rpi3.img.gz and install it on an SD card (or install it on an existing card at your own risk)

Connect the raspberry pi to the network

Boot the raspberry pi and exit ES back to the terminal

Download or copy the new ES with WSOD fix from https://github.com/fieldofcows/EmulationStation/releases/download/v0.3-RPi-1/emulationstationinto the home directory, e.g.
wget https://github.com/fieldofcows/EmulationStation/releases/download/v0.3-RPi-1/emulationstation
Make executable and replace the original ES (maybe backing up the original first)
chmod +x emulationstation
sudo cp emulationstation /opt/retropie/supplementary/emulationstation/
Add the biggest theme you can think of and as many systems as you can :)

Restart

I think I'm doing something wrong changed the above to point to RPI-4, but still getting the same issues, @MWGemini I know you mentioned deleting the old ES file, which one would that be and how :)

**Scannigan**

Never mind worked it out, found the old emulationstation file in Pi folder :)

**Scannigan**

So having a bit of a play on my Pi3 and I'm running a very image heavy theme and the RPI-4 release has indeed stopped the WSOD, only very very rarely on boot when going from system view into detailed view for the first time will the screen flash white for milliseconds before being populated by the images.

I do get booted out of ES when changing settings in the ES menu which also throws up the following error:

emulationstation: . home/pi/EmulationStation/es-core/src/components/OptionListComponent.h:239: T OptionListComponent<T>: :getSelected() [with T = std:basic_string<char>]: Assertion 'selected.size() == 1' failed.
Aborted

fieldofcows

@__Scannigan__ said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

I do get booted out of ES when changing settings in the ES menu which also throws up the following error:

This usually means there is something in es_settings.cfg that ES doesn't understand. Have you run any other development versions of ES on there? Maybe you could post your es_settings.cfg so we can take a look?

**Scannigan**

This post is deleted!

**Scannigan**

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<bool name="BackgroundJoystickInput" value="false" />
<bool name="DrawFramerate" value="false" />
<bool name="EnableSounds" value="true" />
<bool name="ParseGamelistOnly" value="false" />
<bool name="QuickSystemSelect" value="true" />
<bool name="SaveGamelistsOnExit" value="true" />
<bool name="ScrapeRatings" value="true" />
<bool name="ShowHelpPrompts" value="true" />
<int name="ScraperResizeHeight" value="0" />
<int name="ScraperResizeWidth" value="400" />
<int name="ScreenSaverTime" value="150000" />
<string name="Scraper" value="TheArchive" />
<string name="ScreenSaverBehavior" value="random video" />
<string name="ThemeSet" value="oldroom 720p" />
<string name="TransitionStyle" value="fade" />

I've just noticed I don't have the option for random video as screensaver in the ES menu anymore just Dim and Black

I previously ran your v0.2-RPi-beta.2

fieldofcows

@__Scannigan__ said in Solution for " White Screen of Death ":

I've just noticed I don't have the option for random video as screensaver in the ES menu anymore just Dim and Black

That will be it. The WSOD fix version does not include the screensaver. Delete this line in your settings file and it should fix the issue:

<string name="ScreenSaverBehavior" value="random video" />

**Scannigan**

@fieldofcows Ahhh thanks dude, so I have too choose between hi res images and having a screen saver :)

MWGemini

so I have too choose between hi res images and having a screen saver :)

@__Scannigan__ For now, at least. @fieldofcows is working hard on getting all of those features into the main branch, but we need to make sure they are as well tested as possible before he can submit them for review. @fieldofcows is just a volunteer developer, doing this for fun- it's not his job to support EmulationStation or RetroPie. The current maintainers of the RetroPie version of EmulationStation are @Buzz and @herb_fargus I believe. Since they are also just doing this for fun and not profit, we have to make sure that any changes to the system we give them won't make their lives harder by breaking things :).

TLDR: Patience :). Once all the bugs are worked out (which requires more beta testing from users like you- thanks for helping to test!), it will eventually get into the official builds.

For anyone else who is observing these threads and has been following the work @fieldofcows has been doing, I encourage you to help test his work, that way he can find more bugs and fix them more quickly. He's a magician, but perhaps not quite a miracle worker :).

**Scannigan**

@MWGemini Cheers dude, I've pushed this and since added more systems and I can't seem to break it

fieldofcows

I've now tried this on my Raspberry Pi 1. I forgot how slow they are! It took hours to compile then I realised I had used the wrong base image then had to wait again. Anyway...

It works well. Tronky theme loaded with 500Mb of images, maximum set to 100Mb in the UI and no WSOD. Carousel images were all preloaded and worked without delay. System images took a couple of seconds to load if paged out.

With a smaller theme there was no evidence of having to load/unload so no delays.

All seems to be OK :)

MWGemini

@fieldofcows Fantastic! I've only got a Pi3, so I'm sorry I can't help with testing more than I've been able to so far.

fieldofcows

Ok so it's done. I've submitted the PR. I hope there has been enough testing to shake out any problems but if anyone is willing or able to do a bit more testing then it would really be appreciated.

What I would really like to see is the fixed version being tried on existing configurations to make sure they still work without issue.

MWGemini

@fieldofcows What's next on the TODO list? And how can I help?

mediamogul

@MWGemini

What's next on the TODO list?

Champagne and cigars ;). Congratulations to everyone involved on seeing this through. This is definitely a milestone achievement and it is much appreciated.