Raspberry pi3 / retropie games pixelated?

chillyboy

I purchased a pre loaded and set up raspberry Pi3 for my DIY arcade and noticed most games are very pixelated. Its connected to a dell 19" monitor model 1908 through a hdmi to DVI cable.

When connected to my normal samsung TV through HDMI same thing .

Is there a setting that has to be changed so games appear clearer? Sorry i am new to all this.

edmaul69

@chillyboy what emulators are you running?

chillyboy

retropie/es emulation station??

rbaker

@chillyboy There are two options to consider. One for retroarch emulations, e.g lr-mame2003, and one for non-retroarch emulations, e.g piFBA. The difference is that the look can be configured just once in a config file for all retroarch based emulations (together with other stuff like controller settings). So you need to open the retroarch.cfg file located here:

/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg

To do this, you will need to read this tutorial.

When you then open the config, you should look for these lines:

# Smoothens picture with bilinear filtering. Should be disabled if using pixel shaders.
video_smooth = "true"

If you choose "true", it will remove the pixellation that you are seeing.

The other way is to use shaders. They provide a superior authentic look using scanlines to emulate old crt displays.

Look for these lines:

# Path to shader. Shader can be either Cg, CGP (Cg preset) or GLSL, GLSLP (GLSL preset)
video_shader = "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/shader/crt-pi.glslp"

# Load video_shader on startup.
# Other shaders can still be loaded later in runtime.
video_shader_enable = "true"

If choosing shaders, you should turn off the video smoothing.

You can see examples of shaders in action

.

rbaker

@chillyboy what @edmaul69 means is what emulators are you using within retropie? mame? mame4all? etc. Emulation station is just a front end for running all of the emulators. Different emulators require different config files unless they are retroarch based as described in my post above.

chillyboy

In retropie options i noticed i can select Retroarch net play and Retroarch. Just need to get a usb keyboard to configure settings.

chillyboy

Thanks for all your help. After many weeks playing most games either very pixalated or game was not taking up full screen. I managed to change screen resolution to custom 1280x1024 , aspect ratio to 5.4 and put video smoothing on to true.
I went into basic configuration settings for snes and changed settings to above games still appear blury????

mediamogul

@chillyboy

Most of these games are between 30 and 40 years old. Playing them on a HDTV highlights how low-definition/pixelated they truly are. To alleviate that for those who don't like the pixel aesthetic, filters have been created to smooth things out in different ways depending on the filter being used. The smoothing example given above is a popular approach and not very processor intensive, but some people find it too blurry for their tastes.

There are also filters like this that try to take a middle ground by smoothing the pixelation, while sharpening the resulting edge, but some people find this approach too unnatural or plasticy. Something that seems to satisfy purists and revisionists alike is to recreate a CRT look on your LCD monitor like this. Personally, I take the path of least resistance and leave the games in their unfiltered pixelated glory, but at the end of the day, it's all about personal preference. The question you have to ask is, which one of the many compromises is least objectionable to yourself.