Easy way to change output resolution?

Agrajag

Okay, this one is a problem most people would like to have to consider. I'm lucky to have an amazing wife who, upon looking for a house, decided to look for one where I could create a dream home theater -- and we did just that. It has a 150" screen.

Why do I mention that? For now, until 4k projectors come down in price a bit, I'm running 1080p on it, but at that size I ran into an unexpected issue. I've noticed that I much worse at many of the games I used to excel at and thought it was just my age. Then I tried a few on my PC and did much better. I then realized that the main issue was that I need to move my eyes and head so much that I'm just not able to take in everything as quickly as I can on a typical screen. Thus, I'd like to find out if there's a simple, quick way to run through some Retropie-wide video resolutions to find one that works best.

TLDR: Fast way to change resolutions across the entire Retropie platform setup?

muldjord

@agrajag You need to edit /boot/config.txt and add a default resolution for the OS. It is documented here:

hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=82

That should set it to monitor output with a res of 1920x1080 at 60 Hz. But you might want hdmi_group=1 instead (in which case the hdmi_mode=82 value also needs to be adjusted). You will just have to try out different things. Keep in mind that if you change this to an unsupported format, you might need to take the SDCard out and change it back on a different machine due to the Pi no longer outputting to the screen. I'm not sure about that though, but now you are warned. :)

Agrajag

@muldjord As long as I can SSH into it, that won't be a problem.

dankcushions

@agrajag i'm not quite sure what you're asking. changing resolution won't change the size of the image, but the pixel density (it may change the aspect ratio but that's another thing).

do you want to output a smaller image? see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Smaller-RetroArch-Screen/

Agrajag

@dankcushions Sorry, yes. I want to get a smaller image on the screen. That's what I get for posting things in the middle of the night. Thanks.

The reason I caught onto this at first was a really large bezel for Pac-Man. Suddenly I found my scores going up and just realized I could see the ghosts better. Duh.

Out of curiosity, do you know if this approach can be applied on a per-game basis? Some games with bezels may end up too small, for example.