Sony Trinitron KV-32HS420 Resolultion and bars on bottom and top using HDMI

pedrosmith

Hi all! First post here. I read the guidelines, searched for help here and spent a lot of time troubleshooting. Hopefully someone can assist. Thanks!

OK. Running lates RetroPie (LOVE IT!) on a Pi 3B connected to Sony Trinitron Wega KV-32HS420 (specs here https://www.mediacollege.com/equipment/sony/tv/kv/kv32hs420.html) from 2005 which HAS native built in HDMI. It is a 4:3 screen but has "16:9 Enhanced" mode which puts black bars on the botton and top of the screen. Basically, looks like a widescreen version of a movie on a 4:3 scale TV. It's 720p with a max resolution of 1080i, or so, I think. Part of the problem is that I can't figure out what is the native resolution. I assume because it's 4:3 at 720P it's a 960x720 dpi but I can't confirm. Maybe it's actually 720x480? Did "true" HD exhist back in 2005? Is there a way to test for actual resolution?

Anyhow, when starting emulation station and going through the game menus there is a black bar on botton and top and when I launch a game the game is cut off until I press the "picture" button on the TV remove which put the screen in "Zoom" mode and fills in the screen. Games look great this way. I've tried various options in the config.txt but it seems that the following hdmi lines work ok.

hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=85 (1280x720 60ghz)

When I tried using a custom hdmi_mode=87 with the following, I didn't get any video:
hdmi_timings=720 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 50 0 ‭34560000‬ 1

Ideally, I would like to figure our the native resolution and not have the black bars on top/bottom and then have to press the remotes picture button to get full screen. BTW this black bars on top are not related to the overscan. Please let me know if you can help. Thanks, all!

mitu

If you're forcing the image to be 720p, then you'll get a wide screen resolution. As you said, this will add the top/bottom bands.

Run tvservice -m CEA from the command line and look what the TV reports as available resolutions. Depending on what's there, you can use raspi-config and set a default resolution, preferably a 4:3 one so you don't have to stretch the image or get any filler black bands.

pedrosmith

@mitu I will try this. THANK YOU!!

pedrosmith

@mitu PS what is the difference between config.txt and raspi-config? Cheers!

pedrosmith

@mitu Sorry... please ignore! "Generally speaking, raspi-config aims to provide the functionality to make the most common configuration changes. This may result in automated edits to /boot/config.txt"
:-)