Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game

rogeriol

@ByteThis hi, I did not post this anywhere else. I'm using the stock image, latest.

I found out this problem happens in several cores, if not all. NES, SNES, PSX, MSX.

Have deleted retroarch config and reinstalled it. Changed the config again to:

# Start in fullscreen. Can be changed at runtime.
video_fullscreen = "false"

I just cannot disable fulscreen mode with the config, only manually inside retroarch.

barbudreadmon

@rogeriol I'm not sure i understand what you are trying to do here. You are running retroarch outside of a desktop environment, so it will always run fullscreen since there is no window manager to run it in windowed mode.
By "fullscreen", are you maybe refering to wrong aspect ratio and/or integer scaling ?

rogeriol

@mitu here is the log

verbose

with this, I figure the culprit is the --appendconfig /dev/shm/retroarch.cfg.

This file content (below) sets fulscreen true and it's recreated every time, so no point in editing it. I havent found how this is created or how to disable the -appendconfig when running retroarch... any tips?

video_refresh_rate = "60"
video_fullscreen = "true"
video_fullscreen_x = "1280"
video_fullscreen_y = "720"
libretro_directory = "/opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-fceumm"

TIA

rogeriol

@barbudreadmon should work only window fullscreen, this is what I want, so the game will fit better on the screen.

Works manually, I dont see why retroarch cannot start with fullscreen disabled and window fs enabled.

mitu

@rogeriol said in Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game:

with this, I figure the culprit is the --appendconfig /dev/shm/retroarch.cfg.

This file content (below) sets fulscreen true and it's recreated every time, so no point in editing it. I havent found how this is created or how to disable the -appendconfig when running retroarch... any tips?

/dev/shm/retroarch.cfg contains the resolution that you chose from the runcommand launch menu to be applied to the core/game. You should check the launch menu to see what resolution you have set there.

barbudreadmon

@rogeriol said in Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game:

so the game will fit better on the screen.

This is the part i don't understand as a developer on this project: switching between fullscreen and windowed fullscreen is not supposed to be used to change how a game "fit" on the screen. Looks to me like you are using some kind of weird bug to get around something that you are supposed to handle through integer scaling and/or aspect ratio.

To clarify, if windowed fullscreen acts differently from fullscreen as far as how games "fit" on the screen, then this is definitely a retroarch bug and not something intended, it might even be already fixed in the latest version of retroarch (which isn't available on retropie yet ?) since it does sound strangely similar to the issue i fixed in https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/15247 a few months ago.

Nonetheless, if you absolutely want your windowed fullscreen thingy, you might need to set video_windowed_fullscreen in retroarch.cfg.

rogeriol

@mitu runcommand launch menu has nothing set on in besides the emulator to use with all games of the same category.

It's fetching this from somewhere else. I have set the resolutions on the main config.cfg but
video_fullscreen = "false"
is not respected, somehow it gets transformed into
video_fullscreen = "true" in this appendconfig file.

@barbudreadmon I agree, my tv even resyncs when disabling fulscreen manually, but since retroarch cryptic configurations and the high probability to mess things up when changing a lot of configs, I thought it would be easier to just disable fulscreeen at launch, but it's proving to be a challenge as well.
video_windowed_fullscreen is set to true since the beginning.

sds

mitu

@rogeriol said in Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game:

It's fetching this from somewhere else. I have set the resolutions on the main config.cfg but
video_fullscreen = "false"
is not respected, somehow it gets transformed into
video_fullscreen = "true" in this appendconfig file.

The fullscreen is automatically added by Runcommand, based on your detected resolution. As @barbudreadmon said, since emulators are running 'headless' on the Pi, there's no windowing system present so the emulator window is always 'fullscreen'.

Did you modify the config.txt file on the boot partition of your sdcard to force 720p as the video resolution ?

rogeriol

@mitu I changed resolution on raspi config to 1280 720 to be easier on the rendering, but no mention to Fullscreen here.

1280 720 was having an effect on my TV upscale so that borders were huge. Still don't understand why window fs made things better.

As a workaround I changed it to 1920 1080 on raspi config so Fullscreen takes the whole area now. Still the setting can't be changed, but the main problem is solved.

If I leave the resolution adjust to best fit the tv, 4k is selected and I believe this could tax the rendering on performance in RetroArch.

Thanks

mitu

@rogeriol said in Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game:

Still the setting can't be changed, but the main problem is solved.

You can still change the rendering resolution from the Runcommand launch menu, overriding the default one. 1080p is a good compromise though - 4k is a bit much for the GPU rendering.

dankcushions

@rogeriol said in Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game:

If I leave the resolution adjust to best fit the tv, 4k is selected and I believe this could tax the rendering on performance in RetroArch.

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Pi4/#4k-video-display

@rogeriol said in Fullscreen is always on when starting an arcade game:

I changed resolution on raspi config to 1280 720 to be easier on the rendering

pi4 is very capable of doing 1080p so i would use that, using the method in the previous link.