Issues with the Latest Firmware on Nvidia Shield TV Devices - How To Fix

[Jason Carr]

So on top of Google's failures and poor design decisions with Android 11, unfortunately Nvidia managed to screw things up even further by releasing a completely broken update to Android 11 for all Nvidia Shield TV devices. As of posting this topic on February 8, 2022, the issues have still not been fixed in the latest official release of the Nvidia firmware. The latest official release prevents many apps from properly using storage on Nvidia Shield TV devices.

First off, if you have not yet upgraded to the 9.0.0 release of the Nvidia Shield TV software, then don't. Stick with your current firmware. The latest release is very broken and buggy and is guaranteed to give you many issues.

The latest official release as of making this post is 9.0.0 (33.1.0.236). You can check your current version by going to Settings > Device Preferences > About > Shield Android TV SW Version on your Shield device. If your current version is less than this version, please don't update, or you'll run into issues. If you're on this version, though, the below steps should help to resolve your inevitable issues.

We can all thank Nvidia for releasing such terrible/broken software, and then making it so convoluted to download the fix.

Edit (2022-02-21): This "fix" from Nvidia will allow proper access to both internal storage, the SD card, and network drives for LaunchBox to access. However, it will *not* fix the issues with USB drives. As far as we can tell, these are still very broken in the Nvidia firmware, and as far as we know there's literally nothing we can do to fix the issue until Nvidia gets it fixed.

Here are the steps to fix the issues:

1. Click this link: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/shield-tv/9/481434/shield-experience-upgrade-90-hotfix-image/
2. On the above page, click the first green link in the main content, which should take you to a Google Forms page (sigh).
3. Enter your email onto this page (on the bottom).
4. Look up your Nvidia Shield TV serial number under Settings > Device Preferences > About > Status on your Shield device, and carefully type it into the serial number field (obviously don't remove the DONTDELETE- portion - it's like they're REALLY trying to make this complicated, eh?)
5. Click the Submit button.
6. Wait for what they say is 24-48 hours. For us, it took around 3 hours before we were able to download the update on our Shield device.
7. Go back to your Shield device and go to Settings > Device Preferences > About > System upgrade and select "Check for upgrade".
8. If the system tells you that no upgrade is available, you'll have to give it another hour or two and try again. Otherwise, if you're prompted to upgrade, go ahead and go through the upgrade process.

After upgrading, you should be on version 9.0.1 (33.1.0.283), and all (see bold text above) issues with the latest beta version of LaunchBox should be fixed. However, as of writing this post, you will need the latest beta version of LaunchBox for Android in order to fix some of the issues with Android 11 on the Shield TV.

That should get you up and running. Our apologies for the hassles here, even though we really couldn't do much about these issues. Feel free to post about your experiences with this or ask for help below. Happy gaming.

 

[Buckshot60]

Hey Jason, I have followed all of these parameters to the T and I still am not able to access the network attached, mounted storage that I host and import my ROMs from. Any suggestions/help you can provide?

Edited February 9, 2022 by Buckshot60

[Jason Carr]

1 hour ago, Buckshot60 said:

Hey Jason, I have followed all of these parameters to the T and I still am not able to access the network attached, mounted storage that I host and import my ROMs from. Any suggestions/help you can provide?

I noticed that all of my network attached storage was completely removed when I upgraded, myself. I have not done any real testing on this, but my guess would be that Nvidia has not yet fixed those issues with network storage. The above steps should fix issues with reading from USB drives or SD cards, but it sounds like it won't fix network-attached storage. As of yet, I do not know of a solution to that. So I guess it's back to yelling at Nvidia about that stuff.

[zikan]

I've followed these instructions and have updated my ShieldTV to version 9.0.1 (33.1.0.274).

I'm still getting a black screen when attempting to load any game from Launchbox into Retroarch Plus. I have configured Retroarch settings and cores, and am able to run games using only the app. 

I hope there is a fix for this as Launchbox is my favourite frontend and I don't want to have to keep using ArcBrowser!

[Jason Carr]

23 hours ago, zikan said:

I've followed these instructions and have updated my ShieldTV to version 9.0.1 (33.1.0.274).

I'm still getting a black screen when attempting to load any game from Launchbox into Retroarch Plus. I have configured Retroarch settings and cores, and am able to run games using only the app. 

I hope there is a fix for this as Launchbox is my favourite frontend and I don't want to have to keep using ArcBrowser!

Launching games from LaunchBox into RetroArch Plus is working just fine for me on my hotfixed Nvidia Shield TV. So it should be possible to get working. It's hard to know what the issue is for you without diving in deeper. Have you tried multiple platforms? Are you sure you're not just missing a BIOS file? What platforms have you tried? Where are the ROMs located?

[zikan]

I've tried multiple platforms with no luck, getting the black screen each time in Launchbox running Retroarch Plus. I've configured Retroarch correctly and have no issues loading ROMs through the app. Standalone emulators launch OK in Launchbox.

The ROMs are on an SD card which has been formatted as device storage. I might try sideloading Retroarch to see if that makes a difference.

[Jason Carr]

10 minutes ago, zikan said:

I've tried multiple platforms with no luck, getting the black screen each time in Launchbox running Retroarch Plus. I've configured Retroarch correctly and have no issues loading ROMs through the app. Standalone emulators launch OK in Launchbox.

The ROMs are on an SD card which has been formatted as device storage. I might try sideloading Retroarch to see if that makes a difference.

Yes, I would try sideloading the latest version of RetroArch. Other than that, I really have no idea why it wouldn't be working, because I basically have the same scenario on my device.

[oyehia]

Jason,

I may be wrong but i think you need to implement "scoped storage" support to have network drives showing up, I saw that Dig has implemented it too, hopefully not too hard to add support for Android 11 scoped storage support

Regarrds,

[Jason Carr]

4 minutes ago, oyehia said:

Jason,

I may be wrong but i think you need to implement "scoped storage" support to have network drives showing up, I saw that Dig has implemented it too, hopefully not too hard to add support for Android 11 scoped storage support

Regarrds,

We already have implemented scoped storage support. But I will be testing more things with the Shield here soon to see if there's anything else we can do to get around the bugs in the Shield's firmware. For what it's worth, the Shield is the only device that has issues on Android 11 and 12 with the LaunchBox scoped storage support (that we're aware of), and it's because of bugs in their firmware.

[oyehia]

wow ok, i hope you figured it out, i noticed that the games run from the network, but i cannot import from network to add a new platform, it only sees my internal storage when clicking on "import new roms" where my network roms are on /storage<server name>/roms, hope that helps

Regards,

[Jason Carr]

So this is hilarious, or maybe I'm missing something, but I doubt it. I use the FX file manager from Google Play to browse files on the device. When I select my USB drive in FX, it pops up the standard scoped storage folder selection window. The sad thing is that the Android 11/12 folder selection window is completely broken on the Shield, because no matter how hard I try, it's impossible to press the "USE THIS FOLDER" button with the controller:

I sat there for 5 minutes trying to press every button on the controller to try and figure out how on earth to press that button. At this point, I'm not convinced that it's even possible lol. As hard as I try to press that button with my non-touchscreen, it never works.

To put this into perspective, this is the standard window that Google is forcing all emulators to use to find media and/or ROMs, and it's completely broken on the Shield, even with the hotfixes. Sigh.

Is anyone else able to use the standard scoped storage file browser in any app on the Shield TV?

[Jason Carr]

Also, I need to clarify some things from the original post above. The Nvidia hotfixes currently allow LaunchBox proper access to the internal storage and the SD card. What I didn't originally realize, is that I also have a USB drive connected, and that still is not accessible like it was before the Android 11/12 updates. Also, we already knew this, but the network drives are also not accessible. So Nvidia still has a lot of work to do to make this a fully usable experience. It's really too bad that they put out the Android releases with little to no proper testing in such a broken state.

Regardless, I would like to work through things to see if there's any chance at all that we can get access back for USB and network drives, instead of just waiting on Nvidia. If anyone is aware of any apps on the Shield that work properly to access USB and/or network drives, please let me know what they are so that I can test and see what I can figure out.

The above issue with the storage access window, though, really does not bode well.

[Gdoggy]

Quote

 

I'm currently running version 9.0.1 (33.1.0.283) which I assume is a newer version than the one being suggested here for the workaround. However when I try to run LaunchBox I get a splashscreen and then it just dumps me straight back into the main menu. Anyone else having this issue on this version? Is it even possible for me to change to the version being suggested here in this work around now that I have what appears to be a newer version?

Sorry if this is a noob question I just really want to get this up and running.

[manchuriancandidate]

On 2/16/2022 at 2:37 PM, Jason Carr said:

So this is hilarious, or maybe I'm missing something, but I doubt it. I use the FX file manager from Google Play to browse files on the device. When I select my USB drive in FX, it pops up the standard scoped storage folder selection window. The sad thing is that the Android 11/12 folder selection window is completely broken on the Shield, because no matter how hard I try, it's impossible to press the "USE THIS FOLDER" button with the controller:

I sat there for 5 minutes trying to press every button on the controller to try and figure out how on earth to press that button. At this point, I'm not convinced that it's even possible lol. As hard as I try to press that button with my non-touchscreen, it never works.

To put this into perspective, this is the standard window that Google is forcing all emulators to use to find media and/or ROMs, and it's completely broken on the Shield, even with the hotfixes. Sigh.

Is anyone else able to use the standard scoped storage file browser in any app on the Shield TV?

Jason,

I couldn't use a controller to navigate either, but a mouse/keyboard does work.

[Mookdog]

Just use the nvidia shield app on your phone to navigate the menu. It has a touch pad built in the app so it makes navigating the scoped storage screen easier. Dunno what nvidia was thinking with this crap update.

 

Mook

[sage2050]

This problem is baked into Android 11. it's something Launchbox needs to solve, not Nvidia. Retroarch has it fixed in a nightly build, here's the issue discussing the fix:
https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/12181

and the PR with the fix itself

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/13615

Edited February 19, 2022 by sage2050

[Jason Carr]

3 hours ago, sage2050 said:

This problem is baked into Android 11. it's something Launchbox needs to solve, not Nvidia.

No, this is a misinformed and incorrect stance. We've been over this so many times on the forums. It's a very complicated, layered, and messy situation.

3 hours ago, sage2050 said:

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/12181

and the PR with the fix itself

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/13615

I will review the RetroArch changes to see if there's anything that can be applied to LaunchBox. But just because RetroArch fixed some storage access framework things does not mean that Nvidia does not have bugs in the framework lol. That's been proven many times over at this point. Nor are those bugs "baked into Android 11". We've already solved the storage access framework issues on the majority of devices.

[sage2050]

Lauchbox on my phone running A12 can't see usb or network storage either.

[Joseph B]

He Jason, first of all I want to thank you for all your hard work.  Second,  it seems the issue with LaunchBox not working with some emulators and accessing the drive has to do with the scoped storage as already mentioned in this thread.  I also have the Reset Collection front end on my shield and it was just updated for Android 11 and 12.  The author stated it was in fact the scoped storage that was causing his front end not working with many emulators.  Lastly, there is a way to navigate the file folders and select the "USE THIS FOLDER", it's a bit of a pain, but it works.  I found out from trying to select the "USE THIS FOLDER" button that I couldn't click it with my controller, but if you go to the folder you want to select, then go back one level, then select that folder again, the "USE THIS FOLDER" button is highlighted.  Just click the enter button on the shield remote, or a button on a controller and it will use that folder.  It is a pain and needs to be fixed, but this is a work around.  Look for yourself, once you back out and reselect your folder you will see that the "USE THIS FOLDER" button is lighter blue.  Hope this helps out a bit.

[sage2050]

You can also plug a mouse into the shield to make it easy