Emulation Station forces resolution change on boot

[familiar]

I have finally gotten my Raspberry Pi 4b to output 480i over an HDMI to Component transcoder into an old CRT television. While we're in the console everything looks good, but as soon as Emulation Station would kick on, the screen cuts out.

Upon further inspection on an LCD I have lying around, I found that the resolution sticks at 480i until Emu Sta comes on, at which point the screen flickers several times and lands on 1920x1080 before displaying.

I figure there must be a startup argument/script somewhere that tells Emu Sta to switch resolutions and I'd like to either turn that off completely or force the same 480i that the console is using. I attempted to add ./emulationstation -w 720 -h 336 to the file located at /usr/bin/emulationstation but that didn't do anything at all.

Fortunately, adding --resolution 640 480 to the autorun.sf file located in /opt/retropie/configs/all does manage to change emulation station's windows size to 640x480. However, the LCD reveals that the resolution has still switched to 1080p, it's just that the window itself displays small.

It's worth noting that when /boot/config.txt is set up to display 240p instead of 480i, Emulation Station properly boots into 240p, albeit with incorrect colors and wonky scaling. In that case, it doesn't feel the need to override config.txt's stipulated resolution.

TL;DR my Retropie correctly boots in 480i, and some unknown command is resetting the resolution to 1080p once Emulation Station starts up. How do I force Emulation Station to keep the global resolution untouched?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

[mitu]

There's no extra commands in EmulationStation or otherwise that changes the resolution on a stock RetroPie installation. You can change the emulator resolution via from the runcommand launch, but that's about it.

If 240p set via config.txt works, then I don't see why the same method for 480i wouldn't work. How are you setting the 480i resolution for your display - via config.txt or other method ?

Please also add the info asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first to your post (RetroPie version, devices, etc.)