EmulationStation freezes on boot with TronkyFran theme

[Ender519]

Hi all, have RPi2 with latest RetroPie and everything updated. I like the tronkyfran theme but I can't seem to get it to work well. I had a bench test setup with 19" LCD TV 720P.. initially I found I had to increase mem split to 384M in order to get all the background images to display, otherwise was white background.

However, if I take the same RPi2 and plug it into my arcade cabinet, it has a 22" 1080P monitor. Bear in mind I'm not plugging anything else in, just HDMI and power, to ensure it's no accessory or any other difference. Same AC adapter, same RPi2, same everything. But when it boots into EmulationStation the picture is off center (lower than it should be) and everything is frozen, can't even SSH into the RPi.. This forces me to pull power to shutdown which I hate to do.

I had to boot it back up on the bench test setup and change theme back to Carbon which now works fine. The issue appears to be 1080P but I've already tried increasing the mem split to 512M (including commenting the default lines for mem split out of /boot/config.txt) and this still doesn't solve the problem, it's just not usable.

I have 12k games or so across a dozen systems, so I know that's a lot of games.. Any reason why this theme is so unusable and locks up the RPi2?

[herb_fargus]

@Ender519 the images are 1080p and the pi lacks sufficient vram for it with that many systems. It just won't work until emulationstation is recoded or the pi gets more RAM.

You can try optimising the images manually to 720p or forcing a 720p resolution with the config.txt

[Ender519]

OK, helps to know it won't work in 1080p.. I wish that it was more prominent when you went to download themes for ES that it told you if you needed to increase the split or that it simply won't work over 720p. I think that a text warning when you go to install those themes would be simple, appropriate and prevent others from making my mistake.

I edited /boot/config.txt and uncommented HDMI lines as follows, leaving the group alone but changing mode to 4 which corresponds to 720p

hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=4

When combined with 384M split this allows the system to boot and work well using tronkyfran, with only a little bit of the sense that the images are being scaled. So, I definitely appreciate the help! Hope this helps anyone else who falls into this rathole.