320x240 screen looking weird in ES and games

AndersHP

Hey all

In my new Gameboy build I'm using a 320x240 screen, but the resolution in ES and in games are not looking how I'd like it - It's like the screen in some situations tries to render another resolution than it should, some pixel-lines trying to be double and some not. Making text and circles look weird.

The raspberries at bootup look crisp, but EmulationStation, NES games and Master System games look weird, even though I specifically set the resolution in the runcommand-launch menu to "320x240".

What to do here?

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mitu

If the screen already runs at 320x240, then you don't need to use the Runcommand resolution options.
But the image looks badly scaled even on the console dialog - the terminal fonts looks all squished - are you sure that 320x240 is the native screen resolution? Did you configure the solution in /boot/config.txt ? What type/model of screen is this ?

AndersHP

The config.txt has the following lines in it regarding the screen:

framebuffer_width=320
framebuffer_height=240
display_rotate=2
dpi_output_format=24597
hdmi_timings=320 1 20 30 38 240 1 4 3 10 0 0 0 60 0 9600000 1

I know this forum doesn't support RetroPie images, but the build is based on the Circuit Sword made by kite on the Sudomod forum, and the only reason for me not going for a fresh install is that there's certain tweaks to the code to get everything running for his board. I was really hoping to sort these issues out myself with a little help here. The Sudomod forum is not as well visited as this forum is.

Hope I'm getting problems for posting this, the Circuit Sword firmware contains only power management and safe-shutdown procedures as well as battery overlays and pre-set arduino control settings. No roms or anything illegal.

The screen is indeed a 320x240 LCD, check description here.
I think it's a LQ035NC111 screen.

I was only trying the runcommand setting because I wanted to force the game to run at the screen's resolution. But this setting didn't change the way it looks.

AndersHP

Anyways, the theme seems to not really be very compatible with 320x240, so I changed it to another theme.

Integer scaling did nothing to help, but what really helped was setting video_smooth = "true" in retroarch.cfg

I normally dislike video smooth on my arcade with a big screen, but on this little screen it seems like this mode only does what it has to if necessary, so Megadrive games (that's natively 320x240) still look crisp, and NES, Gameboy and other games with a very different resolution gets smoothed a bit more.

mitu

Looking at a few screenshots for other similar builds, I'm thinking the way ES looks like it's normal. Either way, you should post the same screenshots in their forum also and ask if it's normal.
As for themes designed for small screens, there is a recent one designed for the GPI case which was added to the RetroPie list - MiniJawn - which you might find more suited for the small screen resolution.

AndersHP

Thanks for the answers and the suggestion of new theme. I will look into it.

I did, that's where I got suggested to change the integer scaling, that didn't change anything.