Emulationstation not loading emulator on game select.

freakout242

Hi Everyone,

I have RetroPie installed on top of Raspbian on my raspberrypi 4. I currently have my ROMs (all in .nes) in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/nes .

emulationstation launches with no issue and I can see my roms as well as the Nintendo logo. But when I click on the rom to launch the game, it goes back to the desktop for a few seconds, tries to launch the emulator, and then kicks back to emulationstation. Here is the breakdown on what es_system.cfg states:

<system>
    <name>nes</name>
    <fullname>Nintendo Entertainment System</fullname>
    <path>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/nes</path>
    <extension>.7z .nes .zip .7Z .NES .ZIP</extension>
    <command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ nes %ROM%</command>
    <platform>nes</platform>
    <theme>nes</theme>
  </system>

Stats:
RetroPi on top of Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)
Raspberry Pi 4
5V 3amp PWS
Logitech Controller
rom location: /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/nes

mitu

Enable verbose logging when you launch a game and then post the log file on pastebin.com to see the actual error.

sleve_mcdichael

@freakout242 said in Emulationstation not loading emulator on game select.:

it goes back to the desktop for a few seconds

Running from the desktop is not a supported configuration. Something about, I think it's the runcommand.sh script needs a terminal to run? So you can exit all the way out to the terminal and run EmulationStation from there (the officially-supported method) or, some people have had success running it from a terminal window in the desktop (unsupported) rather than just running it as a desktop shortcut or whatever the Linux equivalent is (doesn't work at all.)

freakout242

@sleve_mcdichael yeah that's what it was. Is there a script I can write what will exit the GUI and run emulation station?

sleve_mcdichael

@freakout242 I haven't tried it but I found this on stackexchange:

Killing the desktop first works, but required sudo in my case.

#!/bin/sh
sudo pkill Xorg
emulationstation

From https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/82448/how-do-i-create-a-shortcut-to-emulationstation-retropie-from-raspbian

Edit: this Reddit post suggests it's not quite that easy. Says that ES will run but roms will not load (which is exactly where you are now, yeah?)

In that thread is a link to an article that covers installation of ES (RetroPie), desktop, and Kodi to a Raspberry Pi. At the end of that article is a second page that shows how to install a bash-script menu to select between them. Perhaps this will suit your purpose.

freakout242

@sleve_mcdichael I'll give it all a shot when I get home. I'm also going to try and reinstall the RetroPie image without Raspbian. See if I can get the lcd to load. I think it would make for better gaming in the long run.