Reduce screen size to allow for external bezel..

jamietuley

Hello all,

I have a bartop arcade I've made and all is running fine. My only gripe is that the monitor I've used fills to the edges and leave no room for me to put a vinyl/sticker bezel on the outside.

In retroarch settings I want to keep the aspect ratio as core provided as that works great for the vertical he's like 1942 etc. If I do custom values then all those games stretch!

Is there a way to keep the settings as core provided bit to just reduce the size of the screen as a whole? I wondered if there were such settings on the actual monitor? If so can this be altered in any settings within retropie??

Hope all this makes sense? Any help much appreciated..

mitu

@jamietuley You didn't mention what monitor you are using - is it a 4:3/19:6/18:10/5:4 monitor ?
You can play with the resolution as long as you keep the 'aspect ration: core provided' to 'On' and set 'Integer scaling' to 'On' also, this should preserve the image aspect ration and the scaling should prevent stretching.

jamietuley

@mitu thanks for getting back to me..

The dell monitor im using is 5:4. I have gaps in the cabinet on the left and right sides (which is good for bezel) but just nothing top and bottom.

I do have it ratio set to 'core provided' and also the integer set to ON. Those settings allow all the games to look great except they fill the screen..

I thought the only way I could fiddle with resolution (to my needs) was to set the Aspect ratio to CUSTOM, when I do that it then I can't retain CORE PROVIDED?

Apologies for being dim with all this.. I'm still learning!

Clyde

@jamietuley said in Reduce screen size to allow for external bezel..:

The dell monitor im using is 5:4.

What is its native resolution?

jamietuley

@Clyde 1280 X 1024..

I think.. I looked up the monitor model online (dell 1901 19")

Thanks in advance for any help!

dankcushions

i don't think there's a good way to do this. if you do a custom resolution in retroarch that includes some padding it
a) won't solve the issue in non-libretro games/emulationstation, etc.
b) will need to be done for each arcade game as they have many different resolutions.

the only way i can see is using the overscan settings to add some overscan to give you a vertical border. eg: https://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Big_black_borders_around_small_image_on_HD_monitors
you'd want something like

disable_overscan=0
overscan_top=20
overscan_bottom=20
overscan_scale=1

increase the 20 for _top and _bottom until you get the right amount of border.

however that will
a) mess up the aspect ratio of the games, making them look fatter. i guess you could add

overscan_left=X
overscan_right=X

where X is the same as the number you're using above.
b) give you some pretty brutal scaling artefacts, since you're fairly low resolution to begin with.

maybe there's another way...