My First Three Days With An F-200 - Happy, But Gmenu Doesn't Work

[BadAstronaut]

Hello all.

As the title suggests, I just got my GP2x F-200 on Monday, with an 8GB Kingston SD card. I am very, very happy with this little machine, and find it to be an exceptionally impressive entertainment system/media player combo. The touchscreen is just awesome (I have been playing Exult and Sam and Max via SCUMMVM - excellent).

So, I fiddled around for a bit, read my share of readmes, and it seemed as though I had everything in order, so I decided to try out gmenu. This, too, is a great piece of work. Yesterday I installed Heretic2X and loaded it up via gmenu. I played for maybe ten minutes but then my batteries ran out (this was after about 4 or 5 hours of use - my 2300nma rechargables are doing a fine job so far). I thought perhaps they had ran out because Heretic2X was demanding on the system (I don't know how optimised it is, or anything like that...) and tried switching on my GP2X again. There was a fair bit of distortion on the boot screen and I got the impression the batteries were too low even to turn the machine on, so I switched them off and called it a night.

This morning I took out the used batteries and put them in my charger, and put the other two (fully charged) batteries into the GP2X. When I switched it on, though, it just froze on the boot screen. I tried two more times and the same thing happened, so I realised it must be some problem with the autorun and gmenu. I took the SD card out and booted without it. The machine loaded up just fine, and I hooked it up to my pc via usb and turned the autorun off in the settings. I switched it off, put the SD card back in, and it loaded up just fine.

I accessed the SD card via Windows Explorer to try and delete gmenu, but I could not access it. I was told that the file(s) were corrupt. They appeared to have a file size of 0, and I could not access, delete or rename the gmenu folder. I checked the Heretic2X folder and found the exact same thing: file size 0, cant access, "corrupt" says the error message.

So, I backed up everything else on the SD card (nothing else was corrupted at all) and formatted the card. FAT32, full capacity (so it comes in at just under 8 gigs when formatted).

I then copied everything i had backed up back onto the SD card and installed a fresh copy of Heretic2X and gmenu. All good thus far.

Then, when switching it on, setting autorun on, and rebooting, gmenu has been giving me nothing but trouble. It seems to freeze and crash when I navigate to the games or emulator sections by pressing R or L. I asked it to do an automatic search for gpe files, which it completed, but now it seems to freeze up when I try and view the 'found gpu' and 'found gpe' screens.

Needless to say, this is quite a concern for me. I am new to SD cards and of course the GP2X itself, so here are my questions:

1. Is there a chance I could have done some permanent damage to the SD card?
2. Could I have screwed with the onboard memory of the GP2X when the machine ran out of battery playing Heretic, or when I tried to switch it on without battery?
3. Why would gmenu work 100% fine before all this, and give me so many issues afterwards - even with a full format of the card?
4. Is this something to do with the size of the SD card being 8GB? If so, how come it worked 'before the crash'? Could it be related to the way it is formatted at the factory, and the way Windows XP SP2 formats?
5. Is there an alternative frontend I can use? I am basically looking for something which allows for shortcuts and then selecting the CPU overclock speed when running a program. Touchscreen support would of course be ultimate, but if there is nothing like this right now, no problem.

Thanks in advance for any help, and thanks for sticking with me through a very, very long first post on the forums.

 

[ryosaeba]

I think GMenu2X may be crashing because of corrupted link icons, check that every icon associated with your link is a valid non-corrupted image and try deleting them if you are not sure.

Hope it helps.

 

[BadAstronaut]

Thanks Ryo, I will give that a try right now. Still seems weird that some icons could have been corrupt on a fresh install of gmenu on a newly formatted SD card - it had frozen twice already before I did the 'search for gpe' function...

Will let you know in a few minutes what happens.

 

[paines]

Setup USB Networking like described here:
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/UsbNet_on_Linux
or
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/Tcp/ip_over_usb

Log into you GP2X via Telnet.

Kill all gp2xmenu or gmenu instances.

ps aux gives you all running processes
killall gp2xmenu, would kill gp2xmenu, the original menu by gamepark.

These following 2 Commands

cd /usr/gp2xmenu
./gp2xmenu

would start gp2xmenu. Same should work for gmenu.
The directory and command may vary. When the command fails, or files are missing, you have a good chance to see whats is going wrong.

Hope this helps.

regards
paines

 

[ryosaeba]

Thanks Ryo, I will give that a try right now. Still seems weird that some icons could have been corrupt on a fresh install of gmenu on a newly formatted SD card - it had frozen twice already before I did the 'search for gpe' function...

Will let you know in a few minutes what happens.

I'm talking about the icons provided with the applications, not the icons included in gmenu2x. They should be fine because you just reintalled it, but maybe there's a corrupted icon in some of the applications linked.

 

[BadAstronaut]

I'm talking about the icons provided with the applications, [...] but maybe there's a corrupted icon in some of the applications linked.

Ha, that is exactly what the problem was. Found four or five broken .png's.
Out of curiosity, and a desire to better understand the workings of the GP2X and gmenu2x, how would these other icons become corrupt, if I was only accessing gmenu and heretic2x?
Further, is there a chance that any other files are corrupt now? Or have you seen this problem before and know that only icons will become corrupt because gmenu was accessing them or something? I am just guessing here...

Thanks again for your help!

(instructions)

Thanks for the time and effort you put into writing that, but I didn't need to go that route, thankfully. A reformat, reinstall and replacing broken icons did the trick. I guess you could call these the Three 'Re's of gmenu fixing...

 

[ryosaeba]

GMenu2X only reads those icons so it's totally not its fault for the corruption. When changing sections gmenu2x loads the icons associated with the links so if there are corrupted icons it crashes and since you said that you only reinstalled gmenu2x and heretic2x I thought that there may have been other corrupted files on your sd, but I can't say why they were corrupted.

 

[BadAstronaut]

In that case, this is a bit more worrying. Maybe it has something to do with booting up with too little power, and just accessing a file on the SD card on boot up has the potential to corrupt it? Hmmm, is there any kind of CRC checker or something similar that I can run through my entire SD card to see if there are any other corrupted files? The icons were easy to find, but with a ton of roms on there, and some interpreter-driven games with scores of files, it could be difficult to find.

Perhaps you guys know if there is some way to scan an SD card and search for files with a size of zero?


EDIT: Also, is it possible to download a version of gmenu2x that has touchscreen support? I have been reading about a 0.10 version that you can compile from source on Linux? Is there nothing for Win XP?

 

[jbrodack]

yeah i want that .10 too with the touchscreen support