Anybody recommend a 16:9 over a 4:3 monitor (using Bezel Project)?

benret

I was happy using a 20" 4:3 monitor until I saw what the Bezel Project can do - I love it! Now I'm wondering if I need to find a nice 24" 16:9 so I can get the bezels to display correctly! Has anyone made the switch?

I'm also considering a 720p TV rather than a monitor so I can use the TV's speakers.

matchaman

Any modern 720p (1366x768 actually) will do the trick. I find bezels cool too but after a while they become kind of distracting to me, mainly because the bezels will always emit light on an LCD screen.

Even completely dark bars (bezel-less) are never truly black unless you use an OLED TV but that's a different story (expensive and full of problems, I regret spending $2k on mine).

Then, there's the 16:9 stretching option but I personally get annoyed by deformed gaming.

In conclusion, I would advise you to keep using a 4:3 monitor, especially a CRT for that retro feel and truly spotless parallax motion (with an HDMI to VGA converter).

Last but not least, I advise against using built-in speakers because they completely lack low frequencies but you have probably already acknowledged that I'm a nitpick :P

mitu

@matchaman said in Anybody recommend a 16:9 over a 4:3 monitor (using Bezel Project)?:

Last but not least, I advise against using built-in speakers because they completely lack low frequencies but you have probably already acknowledged that I'm a nitpick :P

If you're using HDMI, then you won't be using the RPI speakers for sound..

benret

Thanks for your advice. I discovered last night that I can enable bezels for only the vertical games just by removing (or renaming) the .PNG for the horizontal ones in here:

/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/overlay/ArcadeBezels

So I think I'll keep the 4:3 for now - its vertical area is taller than a 24in 16:9. I also had to modify the bezel images to fit the 4:3 screen, which isn't a huge problem, because I only play about 40 games.

According to the docs, there's a line in retroarch.cfg:

input_overlay_opacity = xxxxx

I wonder if I can set the opacity to something other than 1 - like 0.5 - so I can dial in the bezel brightness.

Clyde

In the case that you don't know these …

https://github.com/svera/vertical-bezels-4-3

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/19896/arcade-overlays-4-3-1600x1200

(edit: They're the same bezels, just the Github repo and the thread that it came from.)

One easy way to download all of them in one go would be this command in Retropie's console that you land in by pressing F4 in Emulation Station:

git clone https://github.com/svera/vertical-bezels-4-3

You can return to Emulation Station by entering exit.

You'll then find the complete repository in the directory vertical-bezels-4-3 in your home directory. Follow the instructions in the file README.md (also shown at the bottom of https://github.com/svera/vertical-bezels-4-3) to install them.

benret

A thousand thank yous! I'm glad I only finished 2 yesterday!

Also - I found where to set the bezel opacity:

~\retropie\configs\arcade\retroarch.cfg

Changed the line

input_overlay_opacity = "0.700000"

to

input_overlay_opacity = "0.400000"

Now I just need to get my spinner working.

A Former User

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