It’s stable, if you install it as a fresh 0.5 image.
It seems most people are having problems with upgrading 0.4, or whatever they were on before; and of course the OP1 theme.
Considering there is pretty much a tiny team of people releasing the image, and no real beta testers, it’s great to have everyone here, including you as a tester. I’d much rather this than having to wait extra long for less people to iron out the kinks.
I’m happy to test things and report back, instead of waiting for others to do so. That’s part of the excitements, but I do understand if that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Also, I’m not saying anything maliciously here! Just in case it’s coming across as passive aggressive or anything.
For those with concerns about flashing 0.5 to a clean card, I flashed the 0.5 image and it worked fine on my 256gb card. I had been using a heavily modified (and upgraded to buster) version of 0.4 and didn’t think it was wise to struggle with trying to upgrade it.
However this was my second attempt. When I tried to flash and use my 400gb card, I couldn’t get my gameshell to boot. It flashed fine, according to balena etcher, and I even tried using the win32diskimager (which also claimed success), but inside the gameshell it caused a boot loop. Version 0.4 had flashed and worked fine in the past, so I know the card it working, but I’m guessing maybe the large size confused the auto-expand script or some other initial setup step. I’m thinking I will repurpose the 400gb card for something else, since it was rather ridiculously large for the gameshell anyway.
Yeah, I went overboard when there was a sale on the cards last year.
I figured in addition to ISOs and ROMs, I’d use the extra space as a sort of portable file server and/or “flash drive”. I did use it that way a bit, but I never ended up using more than a few hundred GB anyway.
Also, I wouldn’t recommend putting huge ROM collections on the Gameshell. The default launcher is painful when scrolling through lists of thousands of items, and the startup time take a big hit as well, since I guess the launcher has to index all those files. I still kept stuff on the gameshell for convenience, but used the file explorer on gameshell to move stuff around as needed, if I didn’t have it ready to play.
Like @Wizz, I’d also like to know if these fixes can be obtained via update without flashing. (Or are there other manual steps that can be done to obtain the same result?) Also, what are the “bugs found in this thread” that were fixed? It would be useful to know the details, so we can decide if it’s worth reflashing again. Thanks!
English is not my native language so maybe I do not understand correctly.
Are you saying that a fresh install work well with the OP-1 theme or is the theme problematic wathever the method?
Which directories do we need to run git pull from? I tried running it from the launcher and the apps directories and both said I was up to date. Updating the launcher from the menu also indicated I was up to date. Are there any other directories in the system that should be updated? Thanks!
Yes, it does work! I just flashed a fresh image myself, and am staring at the OP-1 interface.
Don’t be afraid to try things yourself on a spare card.
You will also need to do an update via the settings menu. This is the developers listening to people, and making updates and changes to make things work.
When you report things, by trying them out yourself, things get done faster; as long as you’re on the latest version. If we all just wait, nothing will happen.
On a side note, do you actually use the OP-1 theme? Or is it a case of having a compulsive tick that cannot live with something potentially not working within an operating system?
The reason I’m asking is that this could be something to change in the future, ie not having any themes installed on the system, and instead having a garage/repository like system where people can upload/download themes.
Another thing re: the OP-1 Theme’s pngs. It’s still using the older FreeDM icon naming convention, rather than the ChocoDM that is currently the norm. Small thing, but worth noting.
For fairness of future Gamejam entrants, would it also be worth while to consider removing the indie games entries, eg. planet busters. Having them all moved to the garage would be a great way for people to add and remove them at their own leisure.
Oh nice! I’m keen to see your work, as a graphics designer. In fact, seeing someone with design skills make an entire theme, choosing palettes etc would be very nice. I’d like to see a game jam style event, just for this. A theme jam almost.
Well I do not have nearly enough time to create a theme, the icons I did are made on the fly to fit the OP-1 theme, nothing worthy of sharing I believe. I manage a monthly magazine by myself here full time for a Canadian Association and my main expertise is in 3D and photography for publicity. I do 2D but its rarely something exceptional. I work mainly with C4D, Solidwork, Houdini, RealFlow, Keyshot, Redshift and After Effect. For the magazine I use Illustrator and Photoshop.
The instructions generally worked for me. A few tips that folks have already mentioned:
If you know how to ssh into your gameshell from a separate computer, its a lot simpler to just use wget to download the patch file within your session. This might take a while since its 84mb (!!)
the apt-get commands will take a while. Make sure you’re plugged into a charger and that the gameshell doesn’t go into sleep mode
When prompted, I chose “use the config that the package manager provides” as the option. Didn’t seem to affect the ability for the script to execute its update BUT you should probably keep the config as per @javelinface comment below
As someone above already mentioned, make sure you use the chmod +x command to make the patch script executable
I had made sure to disable the OP-1 skin and switched back to the default skin when updating the launcher from the UI. However when I rebooted I got stuck into the Loading... screen. Luckily I was still able to SSH into the gameshell to poke around. When I rebooted the launcher using the commands listed in this post [SOLVED] Reload Launcher from SSH I saw that a python script was segfaulting socket.error: [Errno 97] Address family not supported by protocol. I don’t know if this directly fixed it but I tried removing all the skins installed under /home/cpi/skins and rebooted the device with sudo reboot and everything worked fine after that!
This is an amazing PSA that any user with problems should refer to!
One thing I use is simply “apt” over “apt-get”, since it gives progress bars, so you know if it’s just taking a long time, or your device has frozen.
Regarding using the package maintainer’s version, I would opt to stick with the existing Retroarch config file, as it is the one that was made to work with the gameshell. Too many cores will break if you overwrite this file.
