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cpw83OK, that’s a really weird problem…
I thought it might be a specific ROM or its filename, so I put an image of an updated, working RetroPie (without any ROMs except the preinstalled stuff) on the SD card.
Instead of copying all my ROMs for the different systems at once I copied them seperately for every system: I quit ES and started with “amiga”, started ES again, checked if everything worked, rebooted and made sure everything still worked. Then I quit ES again, went on with “amstradcpc”, checked, rebooted and so on.
Finally I thought I found something:
The problem occured after copying some N64 ROMs in the corresponding n64 folder. Now I deleted them one by one by exiting ES (F4), deleting a single file and restarting ES. The problem persisted until the n64 directory was completely empty. Now every N64 ROM I copied back in caused the problem.
Now I thought I figured out what was happening:
The problem seemed to be caused either by files themselvers or their filename. If you copy such a file into a ROM folder and ES looks for it while starting, something crashes – I thought it might be a problem concerning a regular expression of some kind, maybe one that’s looking for the file extension. Furthermore there seemed to be some kind of “cache file” (which I wasn’t able to locate so far) for every ROM folder containing the filenames, which gets damaged/inconsistent/broken in the process.
That would explain Will’s report of not solving the problem by removing the freshly added games. It seemed if the “broken” directory is completely empty, the corresponding broken cache file won’t be opened and everything works fine. If you put any file (regardless of its name) in there afterwards, everything will stop working again, because the cache is accessed.
Now I just needed to find out which file caused the error, so I put my clean SD card image back on and copied my N64 ROMs one by one, stopping ES before, starting it afterwards and then additionally rebooted after every single file.
And now guess what: The problem didn’t occur…
So it’s not a specific ROM causing it, but something else, maybe some weird combination of ROMs or their names in different folders. I can’t figure out a pattern here.
I also tried to start emulationstation with a “–debug”-switch at the shell, hoping this might output more information in its logfile, but it doesn’t.
// EDIT:
I created an issue on Github for this: