Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

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tronixx2017
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Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby tronixx2017 » Sun Jan 21, 2018 12:43 am

Hi.. using Nvidia Shield and if i want to scroll thru my gamelists, for example NES, Retrox seems to want to load/update the game pictures/covers every time again (seeing the small little loading circle).. and maybe becauce i have a slow internet speed (6Mbit) it comes to crashes due to loading problems for the covers.. at this point i have to force the shutdown of Retrox via the App-Manager.. so its not possible to scroll fast thru my gamelists.. this problem occurs in every gamelist.. only if i scroll veeeeeeery slowly, it doesnt hang up... so my question is, why does Retrox try to update/check the covers at every single time again if i start Retrox? Arent they saved somewhere in the Retrox folder? This permanently cover-check should really be switched off.. only if i want to search/scrape covers, it should scan online.. that really slows down everything..
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avalanche
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Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby avalanche » Sun Jan 21, 2018 7:20 am

I've had the same issue. Usually if I leave it for a minute it eventually catches up but still kind of so-so
tronixx2017
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Aug 26, 2017 3:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby tronixx2017 » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:09 am

Yes.. i have that issue nearly every time i start Retrox.. so just look over to Emulationstation on Pi.. flawless system selection with wheels, customizable collections (favourites, last played, genre related, company related..) smooth fast scrolling through your gamelists with covers, wheelers and videosnaps and custom modification themes.. really awesome.. would be nice if after the next Retrox update some of these features would be overtaken ;)
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deaddisk
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Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby deaddisk » Sun Jan 21, 2018 4:40 pm

Same problems and wishes here :)
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fcatrin
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Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby fcatrin » Mon Jan 22, 2018 5:13 pm

To me it looks like you have a network or storage slowdown.

First RetroX looks for the artwork in local storage, if it is not found, the artwork is fetched from the server and saved to local storage. That file will never be deleted, so the next time it will not be downloaded again. The only way to delete those files is going to an option in Settings -> Device -> Clear.

Reading from the server is quite fast, and reading from local storage is almost instantaneous.

Here you can see a video from my device browsing the lists, also you can see in 00:30 that some covers are downloaded from the server with no slowdown at all.

Emulationstation uses all the files as local storage, you have to perform a long process of "scraping" first, which is one of the main complaints I've heard about it compared with RetroX (with no network/storage slowdowns). RetroX will never do that kind of scraping, just watch the video, I really don't see why I would need to make it "scrape first".

Franco Catrin
RetroX developer
tronixx2017
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Aug 26, 2017 3:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby tronixx2017 » Mon Jan 22, 2018 10:17 pm

Hi.. yes, in the main-menu scrolling works ok without any probs.. but if i press "back" and select out of the system icons for example SNES with approx. 700 Games in it, i got these cover loading probs if i try to scroll faster down through the games.. perhaps you could make a video how that runs on your system..

Network or storage slowdown? Possible.. but every time? My Shield TV is connected via ethernet cable to the internet and my Shield has a 500GB internal harddrive (pro) so these covers should be usually saved on this internal harddrive.. the roms are located on my external usb 2TB harddrive.. maybe that is the delay-problem.. reading filename from usb harddrive->searching cover on internal harddrive or online database..??
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KingPepper50
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Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby KingPepper50 » Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:30 pm

tronixx2017 wrote:Hi.. yes, in the main-menu scrolling works ok without any probs.. but if i press "back" and select out of the system icons for example SNES with approx. 700 Games in it, i got these cover loading probs if i try to scroll faster down through the games.. perhaps you could make a video how that runs on your system..

Network or storage slowdown? Possible.. but every time? My Shield TV is connected via ethernet cable to the internet and my Shield has a 500GB internal harddrive (pro) so these covers should be usually saved on this internal harddrive.. the roms are located on my external usb 2TB harddrive.. maybe that is the delay-problem.. reading filename from usb harddrive->searching cover on internal harddrive or online database..??


Hi tronixx2017,

I have been wondering if you have the App, ES File Explorer/ Manager Pro, as that is supposed to affect RetroX, uninstall that if you have, just to test if it will make a difference, on your system.
If that doesn't work, have you got any of the cleaning App's installed, as they have the ability to clear your Cache, on your device, problem is the App may think that all your cover art and screen shots are to be cleared, and so each time you use that, its clearing everything, including what RetroX updates from the Cloud, thus you are always needing to download again.

Sorry if that didn't make sense, i am not good at explaining things in words.

Hope that helps. ;)
tronixx2017
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Aug 26, 2017 3:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby tronixx2017 » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:34 pm

KingPepper50 wrote:
Hi tronixx2017,

I have been wondering if you have the App, ES File Explorer/ Manager Pro, as that is supposed to affect RetroX, uninstall that if you have, just to test if it will make a difference, on your system.
If that doesn't work, have you got any of the cleaning App's installed, as they have the ability to clear your Cache, on your device, problem is the App may think that all your cover art and screen shots are to be cleared, and so each time you use that, its clearing everything, including what RetroX updates from the Cloud, thus you are always needing to download again.

Sorry if that didn't make sense, i am not good at explaining things in words.

Hope that helps. ;)



Hey KingPepper50,

thank you for the tipp but i already deleted the ES File Explorer long time ago because i heard of these problems.. i use the X-Plore file explorer since then and had no probs with any apps/emulators.. i dont actually use any other cleaning app which could delete the cache of RetroX. I am also using Gamesome and a few other apps which use downloaded covers and there is no prob once the cover is downloaded.. i dont really know what is causing these issues..
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fcatrin
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Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby fcatrin » Tue Jan 23, 2018 11:05 pm

Here is the new video. The first browse activity is using cached images, and the second one is downloading the images.

I've given another thought to this and I see two possible causes:

1) External storage set as internal storage has a long history of slowdown problems in the Nvidia Shield, to the point that people prefer the 16GB version instead of the Pro version (with the HDD).

https://www.google.cl/search?q=nvidia+s ... d+problems

2) Currently RetroX is using the cache area to store the images. That's a sane default because one doesn't need the images to be stored all the time, and they are retrieved if needed. But, for large collections, the operating system will start deleting files, so when you browse some images, older images will be deleted by the system. May be I should use he normal files area, so the files never get deleted.

What do you think about it?

Franco Catrin
RetroX developer
tronixx2017
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Aug 26, 2017 3:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Cover/Picture Loading hangs up...

Postby tronixx2017 » Wed Jan 24, 2018 9:45 am

Yes.. thanx for your video.. i can see that in your arcade collection these cover loading thing is happening as well.. if you dont wait until the covers are loaded and scroll ahead, it may completely hang up RetroX and have to close it via App-Manager. If the datas/covers are really stored only in the cache, it could much improve if you change that to store in the normal file area. I really have a big collection and the limited cache space is surely the reason for the probs.. my external usb drive is not mounted as a internal storage.. the build-in 500GB internal space is more than enough..

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