MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi Im having a really basic issue I can seem to solve? When ever I put any amount of images in wallpapers folder even if its just 1.

Sometimes the image will cycle correctly other times a grey checkered pattern appears instead of the actual picture or pictures

Pictures are formatted .png or .jpg and are 1,920 x 1,080.

fb_terminal=1

It doesn't seem to matter what photo I use the failure will happen.

The only time it's stable is if I use a menu.png/jpg

Ive tried resetting ini to default

I have the same issue and was unable to find a solution. I'll be watching this thread.

I also have the same issue. I assumed there was something corrupt with one or more of my image files, but that wasn’t the case because it still happens when I only have one image in the folder, and it doesn’t matter which one.

Same problem

HOLY SHIT!! I figured it out like two mins after posting that comment LOL. I'm guessing you're all on a Mac like me??????? The problem is that MiSTer is trying to load those damn invisible Apple metadata dot files and thinking they are images!!! This fails, and it reverts to the checkerboard default.

For example, lets say you drag a bunch of files from your Mac to your SD card (or USB or SMB share)…

Wallpaper1.png
Cool Picture.jpg
Background 4.jpg

macOS will detect that the files are going to a non-Apple file system and therefor will generate metadata files along side them…

._Wallpaper1.png
._Cool Picture.jpg
._Background 4.jpg

You need to delete these! You can Google various ways to do this, but my preferred method is a great utility called BlueHarvest which can scan your MiSTer volume (SD, USB, or SMB) and recursively delete ALL dot files. Or you can target just the wallpaper folder. http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest

MiSTer’s code should definitely not attempt to load files starting with a .dot (independent of Apple’s silly behavior here — it should ignore hidden Linux dot files too), file a bug?

And thanks for the tip about BlueHarvest! I guess I need to fork out $15 to fix something Apple refuses to fix

It's 100% what is going on here. Let's say I have 5 images in the wallpaper folder. I noticed that the checkerboard background would show with a high probability, on average 5 times every 10 restarts, which makes sense because each file has a corresponding dot underscore file. Delete these dot files and you never see the problem again!

Where do I file a bug report?

BlueHarvest is great. In addition to the dot files it also cleans a whole bunch of Mac specific crap you don't need on non Mac volumes. It sits in your menu bar, ready to "Clean and Eject" a drive, etc. I totally agree though that an Apple fix would be nice. Even if it was just a command to switch it off in the com.apple.desktopservices plist.

markpaterson wrote: ↑Tue Nov 26, 2024 10:39 am

Where do I file a bug report?

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/issues

I totally agree though that an Apple fix would be nice. Even if it was just a command to switch it off in the com.apple.desktopservices plist.

They do let you turn it off (well, most of them) for network drives, but sadly not for locally connected drives.

Thanks for the link.

I actually have the "DSDontWriteNetworkStores" set to true already, but it made no difference to my SMB share. Perhaps that does not turn off the dot underscore generation but instead just prevents creation of .ds_store?

Filed a bug report https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/issues/935

markpaterson wrote: ↑Tue Nov 26, 2024 11:05 am

Filed a bug report https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/issues/935

Hint added to the bug report. Add a line

hide files = /.*/

to MiSTer's /etc/samba/smb.conf to your used share(s) and problem is gone.
For now the bad thing is that after a MiSTer update (Main/Linux) smb.conf will be overwritten with a default one w/o this fix.