What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?

Dwarfboysim

@capeman took some fiddling with my LG TV but found the option and it works :)

Happy days!!

meleu

@hooperre said in What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?:

@meleu
Is there any way to have the video font (for Cheevos) to sit on top of my overlays?

Unfortunately not. :/

At least none that I'm aware of.

40wattrange

@meleu What exactly are you doing to update retroarch from source?

jonnykesh

@40wattrange RetroPie Setup > Manage Packages > Core Packages > RetroArch > Update from Source.

40wattrange

@jonnykesh Thanks, didnt know if there was some other command line kung fu.

meleu

@40wattrange unfortunately this method doesn't get the bleeding edge version anymore.

I posted about it here and BuZz gave me the reason here.

jonnykesh

@meleu I would stick to the pre-built binaries, they usually have been tested.
Is there any way to check when a binary was compiled? Any ideas @meleu ?

meleu

@jonnykesh RGUI > Information > System Information > Build Date

jonnykesh

@meleu I use xmb does it work in that menu view? How about non-libretro emulators?
Is there not a way to include the binary build date along with the description for example?

BillyH

I've had RetroPie for two days now,and I've made the following tweaks:

video smoothing on all the emulators I use
made the window for the GBA emulator smaller (to 720x480, like in the doc, which I decided to start with and after trying decided was satisfactory)

Will experiment with some shaders later on, so if anyone feels like advising on this...

Doesn't really count as tweaking but since it wasn't in the auto image build: I also installed and updated the ScummVM package (and set it to OpenGL graphics) and I installed the package that makes Dinothawr run.

fabio78

@billyh never use video smoothing. Besides leaving the games looking hideous, like they've been smeared with wax, performance takes a hit, and on top of everything it creates a couple of frames of input lag.
If you want a less aliased look, switch that off and use the hq2x.cg shader instead. It looks more natural because you can still tell the pixels, and the image is a lot sharper.

BillyH

@fabio78 I like the smoothing option for now, makes the image more pleasant to look at - I wasn't able to count the pixels on my old box television either when I was playing SNES games. Smoothing gives it all a bit more of a 'drawn' look in my eyes, I think it looks very good for 16-bit games.

However, I'll check the shader you mentioned to see if it's preferable :-)

BillyH

@fabio78 Tried out some different shaders and in the end I went with the one that simulates CRT lines :-)

BobHarris

@fabio78 I disagree. I always use smoothing, makes the games look so much better (in combination with a scanlines shader). Otherwise it's way too pixelated for me.
Smoothing+crt shader = old crt telly.

caver01

@billyh You may want to follow this thread too, as the recent work on the zfast scanline shaders is very compelling. These are faster (better?) than the CRT shaders, especially the curvature variants. They are not yet built-in to the RetroPie setup, but I expect this will come in time. Something to watch though. I have added them to my setup manually and they work great. Scroll back through that thread to see screenshots/discussion.

BillyH

@bobharris I didn't actually try combining the shader and video smoothing, will do that later on. Just using the scanlines shader already looked great though, and that also fixed a number of other issues I had with the way the games looked. It's telling that I already enjoy gaming on the Pi so much more than I enjoyed gaming on an emulator on my laptop.

@caver01 Looks pretty good but I think I prefer horizontal scanlines over a pixel grid, so while I will definitely try that shader if it gets added in a RetroPie update, I won't go through the trouble of downloading and installing it myself. Also: if by faster tou mean less/no lag, that's great. If you mean FPS: I don't care if something is 30fps instead of 60fps, even with current day games. I'd rather have a 30fps 720p game that doesn't stutter than a 60fps 1080p game that has slowdown. Also: I tried the curved shader but in the end decided I enjoyed non-curved more.

caver01

@billyh Hopefully, you looked beyond just the first image from my link. There were early iterations that looked more like pixels, but the final zfast is absolutely a scanline shader.

BillyH

@caver01 Your link actually dropped me off at the most recent post and I scrolled back from there. While the last picture I see is definitely more scanline than the first screenshots, the second to last still shows a lot of pixel separation.

I guess I'd have to see ut in action on my own television before I can tell if it's really more enjoyable than the current setup of crt + smoothing (yes @BobHarris, I do that too now), which is why I figured I'd just try it if it ever got into a RetroPie update.