Start A Game From The Command Line Instead Of Emulationstation With Retropie

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Retropie is initially set up so Emulationstation launches automatically. You can quit out of Emulationstation at any time by using the built-in menu options (if your controls are set up to do this) or by hitting the F4 key on an attached keyboard.

Launching A Game Manually From The Command Line

Once at the command line, launching a game is done with the following command ...

/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ snes /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes/supermetroid.smc

Just change the system (snes) and rompath (/home/pi/retropie/roms/snes/supermetroid.smc) accordingly.

Please note, it's the actual filename of your ROM that's needed here, not the name that shows in the gamelist on Emulationstation. If your ROM filename has spaces in it, use single quotes as in the following example ...

/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ snes '/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes/The Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Past (U) [!].smc'

One final note, if you're having trouble with your machine/system crashing if you've used the above in the autostart.sh file to create a single game system, this might help. As of November 2019, running RetroPie 4.5.1 on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ we've noticed the system will crash shortly after attempting to boot the ROM if the Pi is connected to a network via ethernet cable. Unplug your cable and try again.