Reply To: More then 12 Emulators active

[devo]

Hi ceuse

I don’t think your problem has anything to do with your scraped images or gamelists. From looking at your screenshots you appear to be using the Zoid theme. The background images for each emulator in Zoid are scaled to 1080p. Not sure why, but these larger images seem to quickly use up all your VRAM.

The Simple theme which comes as standard with RetroPie has images half this size (720p), and because of this I’m am able to run up to 23 emulators before I start to experience frozen white screens when booting.

I went through all my background images a few weeks ago and halved them again in size to only 640×360. This has allowed me to have even more emulators to choose from on the menu screen without any more freezing problems. I currently have 31 emulators up and running.
Downgrading the backgrounds to an SD resolution has added a little bit of blockiness and jpeg artifacting, but it really doesn’t look as bad as you might think.

I would recommend that you switch back to the Simple theme and then try adding a few more emulators to your list. I believe you should then be able to make it into the early 20’s before you experience any more frozen screens.

Do any of the devs know why these background images cause such a problem? The folder which contains the Simple theme is only around 11MB in size, and quite a bit of what is contained within isn’t even used, such as the original unblurred images and currently unsupported systems. Now that we have the RPi2 with 1GB of RAM, I can’t understand why these larger resolution background images can cause such a drain on resources. Is there any kind of quick fix which could be implemented?