What different manual installation instructions are needed for Pi 1/0?

BobbyJoe

Hi,

Manual installation of RetroPie onto a brand new, up-to-date Raspbian installation (I won't bore you with why just taking the prebuilt RetroPie image for 0/1 wasn't an option for me this week) on a Pi Zero W, installation goes generally OK but then emulationstation fails to launch. I did the diligent thing and looked for previous posts regarding same error messages on a Zero, ahead of considering putting a post up here with all the precise details etc, and eventually it struck me that there are two different prebuilt images, one for 0/1 and one for 2/3/4 - but there's only one set of Manual Install instructions. That makes me suspicious that the manual instructions may be only for the later hardware, though it doesn't prove it.

Further Googling found me one post somewhere that suggested passing a __platform=rpi1 parameter in when calling retropie-setup.sh but that didn't sort it out either (after uninstalling the original installation, which I guess by default is for later hardware than the 1 or Zero).

I guess I'm asking two things - one is where to find documentation on what is needed for manual installs (a search for __platform didn't help me, nor did looking inside retropie-setup.sh itself, and I can't find anything on the forum), and the second is whether this could get added to the Manual Install page so that newbies like me don't get confused and stuck :-)

Thanks!

mitu

@BobbyJoe said in What different manual installation instructions are needed for Pi 1/0?:

eventually it struck me that there are two different prebuilt images, one for 0/1 and one for 2/3/4 - but there's only one set of Manual Install instructions.

There's no different sets of instructions for the Pi1/0 compared to the other Pi platforms. Why don't you tell what's the error you encounter when launching EmulationStation.

BobbyJoe

@mitu the error I'm getting is:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::logic_error'
  what():  basic_string::_M_construct null not valid
Aborted

when I try running emulationstation from the terminal.

I'm puzzled then - why are there two separate images? What sort of differences are there between them that don't need to be reproduced by the user when manually installing? Is there some platform detection in the setup scripts that then does some conditional stuff which has already been done by the time the prebuilt images have been made.

Thanks!

mitu

@BobbyJoe said in What different manual installation instructions are needed for Pi 1/0?:

when I try running emulationstation from the terminal.

Are you running from the login terminal or from a desktop session (X.org) terminal ?

I'm puzzled then - why are there two separate images? What sort of differences are there between them that don't need to be reproduced by the user when manually installing?

Who says that there aren't differences between systems when installing manually ? The instructions are the same, setup script is the same, but the result is a bit different.

Is there some platform detection in the setup scripts [...]

Yes, there is, and depending on that the binary packages are different (compiled with different options and optimizations), plus some installation options are different - some emulators are not suited for the Pi0/1's CPU, thus on those platforms they're not installed by default.

BobbyJoe

Ah... OK, then this is just a case of having to turn the dial down to 1 on the Novice level. Although the Manual Instructions page does say:
"you can't run Retropie and PIXEL at the same time, you will need to logout of the PIXEL desktop environment in order to run emulationstation and the emulators RetroPie installs."
if you're as clueless as me then you won't know what PIXEL is or that the desktop your out-of-the-box Raspbian installation is presenting you with is PIXEL (and that I need to get out of it), and that PIXEL isn't some other thing.

Going into the Rasbpian settings and setting it to boot to CLI, and rebooting, does resolve it, thanks.

Not so much a "hasn't read the instructions" as a "hasn't understood the instructions, even though it says it right there..." My bad.

Thanks @mitu for sorting it out - it does start correctly when booting to CLI.

mitu

No worries, it's a common mistake. Have fun playing games !