Upgrading to RetroPie 4.7.1 - are these the correct steps?

omen_peter

Hello all! I've been away from RetroPie for a while, and it seems I'm now on an out-of-date OS and need to upgrade to Buster.

I've read some very helpful posts about upgrading so I think I know what I'm doing. So I'm going to list the steps I'll take, and any advice or insight from other forum users would be appreciated.

So my brand new micro SD card arrived in the post today (taking advice you should start from a fresh image) so I may even get started tonight, and will update this post as I go.

Steps:

Download latest 4.7.1 RetroPie image - DONE
Copy the etc/emulationstation/themes folder to the configs/all/emulationstation folder via file manager on the Pi - DONE
Take a backup of the configs folder via samba shares (I use a portable HDD for my roms so the roms and bios folders are ready for the upgrade already) - DONE
Flash the new 4.7.1 image onto the new MicroSD card on my PC via Etcher - DONE
Plug new MicroSD card into the Pi and let it do its thing - DONE
Once file system has been setup, plug in the HDD to the pi and on my PC copy the backed up configs folder to the new configs folder - DONE
Back on the Pi, copy the etc/emulationstation/themes folder in configs/all back to the etc/emulationstation location - DONE
Reboot the Pi - DONE
Carry on gaming - DONE

Is that it? Is there anything else I should be doing? Or change the order above?

I may well get on with this before anyone replies, but even so this might help others to upgrade.

P.S. I realise there are also a couple of tweaks I need to make to my FB Alpha setup with it now being FB Neo, but that might need to wait for another day!

mitu

@omen_peter said in Upgrading to RetroPie 4.7.1 - are these the correct steps?:

Copy the etc/emulationstation/themes folder to the configs/all/emulationstation folder via file manager on the Pi - DONE

The themes present in /etc/emulationstation/themes can be re-installed from RetroPie-Setup, there's no need to back them up - unless you have a a lot of them.

If you're upgrading from v4.4, I'd suggest you leave out RetroArch's configuration folder and use the default config.

omen_peter

@mitu thanks! Am just about to copy over the configs folder so will leave the retroarch folder alone.

Apart from a slow transfer speed everything seems to be going ok at the moment...

omen_peter

Well I'm nearly there now (stopping as nearly midnight here). Bit of an issue getting wifi to connect, and seems my wii u pro controllers need to be re-connected, but that may be standard anyway.

Also getting this message:
lvl0: VolumeControl::init() - Failed to find mixer elements but found this article so will review tomorrow:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/26628/audio-issues-after-latest-raspbian-updates-june-2020

All in all a successful day!

P.S. Will update my signature at some point too.

omen_peter

Ok, so having spent quite a bit of time on this, I would have to downgrade my assessment to semi-successful - ha! I ended up having to install alot of emulators that I thought would still be on there as they were on my old build, and nearly all the other emulators had binary updates for me to run.

My RetroPie build is very basic really, with the only tweaks being those detailed in the official docs, so looking back I think if I was to do this process again, I would just start completely clean and go through each system one by one to check all is working correctly and updating/tweaking as appropriate. At least then I would know what needed to be done, rather than finding some things had copied over and other bits hadn't. This is most definitely due to errors on my part I'm sure.

On the plus side, on my 4.4 build my Sega CD and ZX Spectrum games wouldn't work (Sega CD would jump back to ES, and ZX Spectrum would crash the Pi) but now they do, so not sure what happened there but it's all good now - ha!