Can't select emulator for ROM

evothian

This has been working since I set up my pi a few weeks ago but it has suddenly stopped. I haven't really done much to it other than add new roms. I currently have both MAME and fba stuff in the arcade folder so I have lr-mame-2003 set as the default and then for the handful of fba roms I was using "Select emulator for rom" in the runcommand menu to make those launch using fba.

Now if I try to either "Select emulator for rom" or "Remove emulator choice for rom" on a ROM that I've previously selected an emulator for I see an error message flash at the bottom of the screen and no changes happen.

The message is: sed: couldn’t open temporary file /opt/retropie/configs/all/<temp name>: Permission denied

Pi Model: 3
RetroPie Version Used: 3.8.1
Built From: SD Image (I did update the setup script very early on when getting my bluetooth controllers working but that was well before the issue started)

Anyone have any ideas? I haven't made any changes to any users or permissions or anything.

ProxyCell

This is a total shot in the dark here: but could you set very "permissive" permissions on that folder and all of it's sub-directories and files ?

BuZz

Sounds like the pi user no longer has write permissions in the folder as @ProxyCell mentioned - probably due to being owned by root. try sudo chown -R pi:pi /opt/retropie/configs if that doesn't help we might need to do some chmods also.

evothian

Thank you @ProxyCell and @BuZz ! That fixed it. That folder was indeed owned by root. Everything is working again.

evothian

Whenever I reboot the pi it does change the owner of the /opt/retropie/configs/all directory back to root (all the other directories under config stay owned by pi. Not sure what is causing it to change back. For now I have a workaround whenever I need to make a change at least.

pimpmaul69

@evothian said in Can't select emulator for ROM:

Whenever I reboot the pi it does change the owner of the /opt/retropie/configs/all directory back to root (all the other directories under config stay owned by pi. Not sure what is causing it to change back. For now I have a workaround whenever I need to make a change at least.

If you sftp in it with winscp logged in as root and right click on the /opt/retropie/configs/ folder and choose 0777 permissions for all files and folders is it changing back from doing it that way? I updated to retropie 4.0 beta 2 and it messed up the permissions for my config folder and thats how i fixed it. Worked like a charm

evothian

@pimpmaul69 Yeah that's essentially what I ended up doing. I just made the folder 777 and then when the owner is root it doesn't matter.

The command I ran was sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/retropie/configs for anyone else looking at this later.

LeKing

Thanks so much guys it helped me well ! I use "sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/retropie/configs" I searched in every god damn files ... of my Rasp for that... Thought I might find one just like the "videomodes.cfg" to just delete the preset ... !

Thx again !

M4X4M

For people still having to deal with that problem:
In my case the tips here didn't work out so I went into:
sudo nano /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulators.cfg
And deleted everything in it manually. After that it worked again (at least for now)

sssetz

@M4X4M said in Can't select emulator for ROM:

For people still having to deal with that problem:
In my case the tips here didn't work out so I went into:
sudo nano /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulators.cfg
And deleted everything in it manually. After that it worked again (at least for now)

THank you @M4X4M this worked for me, FINALLY. Its been weeks. :)