Reply To: Adding games causes black screen after splash screen

[cpw83]

Got it: The problem occurs if you have ROMs for a lot of (respectively “too much”) systems; It has nothing to do with the ROMs themselves.

The background images for each system are (respectively “were”, see below) quite big and they are all loaded into the VRAM when ES starts. Depending on the background graphics for each system, the problems started if you had ROMs for around 17 different systems.

Nils fixed that by reducing and optimizing the blurred images from 1080p to 720p (see https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/250) to reduce the amount of used VRAM by ~50%.

I tested it – it’s still too much for 23 systems, but as a “quick & dirty” workaround you can just delete some background images for some systems in the “simple”-theme (/etc/emulationstation/themes/simple).

So if you run into this problem, you can do the following:

Exit ES (F4)

cd ~
mkdir dl_tmp
cd dl_tmp
wget http://blog.nilsbyte.de/download/emulationstation-theme-simple-v1-2/
sudo mv index.html /etc/emulationstation/themes/es_theme_simple_v1.2.zip
cd ..
rmdir dl_tmp
cd /etc/emulationstation/themes
sudo rm -rf simple
sudo unzip es_theme_simple_v1.2.zip
sudo rm es_theme_simple_v1.2.zip
sudo reboot

If it still won’t work, as said delete some .png and/or .jpg images in some system folders in /etc/emulationstation/themes/simple. You’ll just have a white background for those systems then, but everything else will be fine.