This problem is already solved, but it has troubled me across several games and in the interest of building up a lot of the historical gaming knowledge lost on forums and Reddit, I'd like to post here. I don't fully understand the problem yet, so if you have more info to share, please post.

PROBLEM STATEMENT: If you're playing an older Unity game on Steam under Linux (either on your Steam Deck or desktop) and experience black screens, errors, or crashes when a movie plays such as an opening cinematic, try re-encoding the videos with HandBrake. Credit to Bird Observer on the River City Girls discussions where I found this and generalized the instructions:

1. From Desktop mode, right-click the game in your Steam library and select Manage > Browse local files
2. Find the folder containing the video assets (OPTIONAL: copy the folder into a backup location to prevent having to redownload the files if you make a mistake)
3. Start HandBrake and click Open Source, then navigate to the game folder(s) you discovered in Step 2 (download HandBrake from Discover or https://flathub.org/)
4. Use Shift or Ctrl to select the movie assets
5. Settings
   • Preset: Official > General > Fast 1080p30
   • Format: MPEG-4 (avformat)
   • Align A/V Start & Passthru Common Metadata ✅
6. Set a destination folder under To: at the bottom of the HandBrake window, I recommend a separate working directory under ~/Videos or wherever
7. From the top menu bar, click the dropdown arrow (v) next to Add To Queue and choose Add All
8. From the top menu bar on the right, click Queue and then select Start. This can take several minutes to complete depending on your system and how many/how large the movie files are
9. When finished, copy the completed files from your working directory back into the appropriate game directory

NOTE: For some games using .wmv, simply re-encoding them to .mp4 and then changing the file name back to .wmv should be sufficient for the game to find the appropriate file and play it without needing to worry about further encoding or format issues.

I hope that helps someone, and again, if you have any additional steps or information to help clarify the topic, please feel free to add! I suspect this is largely applicable to Unity games, but may help with other engines where the movie assets are unpacked and easily accessible.

2nd UPDATE: To anyone confused by this issue like I've become, there's a difference between EmulationStation and ES-DE,

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulationstation/comments/1ax92io/what_is_emulation_station_de/

EmulationStation (not DE) is an old frontend that got footing when it was used as the primary interface for RetroPie, a retro gaming operating system for Raspberry Pis. It hasn't been updated in a very long time; the last commit to main happened 6 years ago and the last release was in 2014.

EmulationStation got forked by a few different developers for their own projects; batocera-emulationstation is the fork used in Batocera OS, for example.

ES-DE is a fork of EmulationStation started by an independent developer (Leon Styhre) to be used as a general-purpose frontend. It brought a lot of quality of life features including automatic emulator scanning (which is what makes the front-end work out-of-the-box on your machine) and a pretty excellent themes engine. It's not affiliated with the original EmulationStation project, and it's actively maintained by Leon (he seems to be the only developer working on the project from what I can tell).

File locations:

• gamelists: ~/ES-DE/gamelists//gamelist.xml
• downloaded_media: ~/ES-DE/downloaded_media/
• systems: ~/ES-DE/custom_systems/es_systems.xml

Individual ROM paths can be set on a per system basis by changing

UPDATE: Good call, I forgot to cover the basics. After a bit more testing, it appears I don't have the issue when using the AppImage downloaded from their site, https://www.es-de.org/

Thankfully the AppImage uses most of the configurations and files I already have set in home, however the one issue I have with accepting this as a replacement is that it doesn't respect the system locations I have specified in /usr/share/es-de/resources/systems/linux/es_systems.xml. Does anyone know where/how I would modify individual system paths in the AppImage? The reason this is important to me is because I'm working with a years old ROM collection on my network drive that I need to set individual paths for each system collection (or re-sort years of ROMs into the default EmulationStation directories ..... please no ...)

Alternatively, can someone help me continue to chase down this problem? It looks like I've been able to replicate it on all 3 of my varied systems now (gaming rig, media center, laptop) so either there's something particular failing on my systems during the build process or there's an issue with the AUR package. How can I track this down and file an appropriate bug report with them, I'd like to learn how to do this proper so I can get this documented for others that may encounter the issue and contribute back.

Problem statement:

When running EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) 3.1.1 (installed from AUR), I'm able to browse through games and watch the video previews after hovering over a game for a second but the audio is noticeably stuttering and crunchy. Audio quality in video previews continues to degrade over time until EmulationStation eventually freezes after only 5-10 minutes of use.

EDIT: Further clarification, crashes only happen while video previews are actively playing which is why I feel the issue is so heavily correlated. ES-DE can continue to be used if video previews are disabled, not shown in theme, or it sits resting on a menu item that does not play a video preview.

Navigation audio is crisp, as is the input and feeling of navigating menus, it doesn't seem to be straining any system resources I can see in System Monitor. Audio in emulators launched through ES-DE is perfectly fine. All videos are stored in appropriate directories in ~/ES-DE/downloaded_media/ and play without issue when opened through VLC. They were downloaded through the built-in connection to https://www.screenscraper.fr/ using the personal account I set up, so I don't feel there are any issues with the source files.

I've also increased the VRAM limit from the default(?) value of 512MiB to 672MiB but haven't noticed any difference, I don't feel like it should need that much to begin with.

~/ES-DE/logs/es_log.txt contains no additional information after the crash. When exiting cleanly I see "ES-DE cleanly shutting down" but when frozen this line is omitted. This is probably due to me having to force quit it, if there are any ways to collect better logs or error info, please let me know.

Hardware and other info:

This is happening on two completely different systems, my gaming desktop with an AMD 5900x and 3080 RTX (proprietary drivers) as well as an old Lenovo something with Intel and something integrated. Both are running Arch with KDE Plasma on Wayland (though X11 also seems to have the issue for whatever that's worth). Let me know what other details may be helpful to provide. Audio is pipewire.

I documented my whole setup process for this so I could replicate it on any system I installed and given how dissimilar the systems are otherwise, I feel like this must be a case of some easy misconfiguration I'm missing or weird dependency I don't have installed? I've tried searching, but internet search is worthless these days. I appreciate any thoughts anyone might have on the issue, any threads I can pull would be helpful. Thanks!

I've got a real pain of a problem here and I'm looking for some outside opinions on the best way to resolve it, here goes:

Recently purchased an R36S Retro Handheld (https://r36sgameconsole.com/) and installed Rocknix (https://rocknix.org/) on it. When loading arcade games in RetroArch (1.20.0) the core it's using is MAME(0.273 (unknown)). My MAME collection is 0.256 (downloaded from Internet Archive once upon a time). Everything is already scraped, I would like to avoid downloading an entire new collection to work with the 0.273 core. What's the best course of action here?

1. Copy a compatible ARM 0.256 core to the device (where do I find this/how do I compile it myself?)
2. Is it possible to convert my rom set to 0.273 and then I'll just switch the locked cores on all my other devices from 0.256 to 0.273?
3. Just download a new collection

Something else I'm not considering? I know there's historical reasons for why MAME is managed like this, but in 2025 this seems untenable.

Thanks for any help or advice you can offer!

Can someone help me figure out what it even is I'm trying to do? I'm a tech savvy kinda persons and if someone just gives me the general idea/right keywords to search for I can probably figure the rest out myself, but I'm caught in a real X/Y problem.

JUNK: Arch, KDE (X11), 3080 (proprietary drivers), OBS, Elgato HD60 X, 3440x1440 ultra widescreen

I just want to do some simple streaming to Twitch/Youtube and game recording.

The Elgato obviously doesn't support my ultrawide so my original thought was to leave the UW monitor plugged in with DisplayPort (as it already is) and then plug in the Elgato with HDMI and then switch the monitor input when I'm ready to stream. The UW stretches the 2560x1440 out though, how do I configure the viewport to keep the proper aspect ratio and put black bars on the side? Alternatively, can I configure the UW to 2560x1440 with black bars and simply mirror the display, or will I take a performance hit when streaming like that? And how do I change the xconfig on the fly, is that something I'd want to write a script for?

I inherited the Elgato from a friend who gave up on streaming and while I'm not entirely opposed to spending more money on potentially more appropriate gear ....... I'd really rather not.

Like I said, if someone can just explain to me what I should be doing and give me a swift kick in the ass towards the right direction, I can do the heavy work of putting all the pieces together, I'm not looking for a total solution 😵😵‍💫 Thanks!