RetroFE forums

OK, give this one a try and let me know. This should be used with the OLD core directory, so using the old releases of gstreamer and SDL!

I'll see if I can install gstreamer 1.4, compile with that, and run the latest code in the old core directory with new SDL libraries. That should tell us something about the cause at least.

The problem doesn't exist on Linux; if it was I would have fixed it a long time ago. It may very well be an issue with one of the plugins actually. I noticed that 1.4.0 used a lot of internal video codecs while the latest releases use separate audio/video plugins.

OK, so so far we have several crashes within the gstreamer library itself, which apparently is an issue under Windows, but not under Linux. Very odd indeed.
We've also got a null point issue in the code; I'll give that a closer look as well. Apparently it managed to create a list without a selected item somehow; perhaps an issue with an empty list?

Thanks. This appears to be a cross platform issue, but might also explain why some people with multiple windows using a single screen definition were having crash problems. I'll see if I can reproduce and debug the issue. Thanks again for the report.

I know. I'm working on getting rid of all the memory leaks first, because those indicate improper handling of memory. These crashes are probably caused by access of an already deleted piece of memory (that's usually the only reason a program crashes rather than locks up), so cleaning up memory usage is a first step. There appear to be some issues with the animation memory, so it's quite possible that some themes are crashing due to the animations on their videos. That would explain why some themes are affected while others are not. It's also possible these issues reside in the new Windows gstreamer or SDL libraries; that would explain why they happen under Windows, but not on Linux. Perhaps it's just a gstreamer plugin that's causing the problems; I'm slowly sorting out the mess, but it takes time. I already spent over 40 hours debugging this over the past few weeks.

It's a rather big code change I'm afraid. Not only does it require me to replace the name variables from strings to something that supports UTF-8, but it also requires me to change the entire text printing code, which currently only supports default ASCII characters. I'll get to it sooner or later, I'm sure, but it's not on top of my priority list at the moment. RetroFE was made F/OSS exactly so others could help code, but so far it appears to be a one man job (two if you count the original programmer Emb).

Well, I could certainly use some help in this department. The current website isn’t exactly good nor impressive.