Bluetooth audio failing

[awolf2821]

Hi, I’m using a manually-installed image on a pi 5.

Here’s my dilemma:

On the pi 5, raspberry removed the composite video + audio out jack, and replaced it with PCiE connectors. It’s still possible to get composite video out from the pi by soldering to the J7 pad next to the HDMI ports. I’ve rigged together a cable, and it works, but there’s no way to get audio from the pi, as the HDMI ports are disabled when using composite video, along with the audio.

Thus, I’ve been trying to configure a Bluetooth speaker to work with retropie using pulse audio’s Bluetooth module. I’ve followed this guide here.

When I try to find the speaker, retropie cannot find it even though it is on and pairing. When I try to remove the device, it throws this error:
gdbus.error:org.bluez.error.notready: resource not ready

I’m at a complete loss as to how to fix this. Help would be appreciated.

[mitu]

RetroPie's BT pairing is geared mainly to input devices (gamepads/keyboards) and may not work properly on Audio devices. Try to pair manually using bluetoothctl - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth.

You may also want to replace pulseaudio with pipewire-pulse, since Pipewire has replaced Pulseaudio in the latest RaspiOS (and other Linux distributions).

If you don't succeed, try installing the RaspiOS desktop image, which has the Bluetooth pairing utilities on the desktop and installs the necessary audio packages. Once you make it work, you can disable the graphical desktop and boot to console to start EmulationStation.