Better Quality gaming RetroPie3
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So I am very new to the world of capabilities that is the RetoPie. Just a little about me, I have built my own computer so I know the basics BUT coding and messing around in terminal/command prompt are sometimes a little to advanced for me. So any advice you could give me that isn't too technical would be perfect!
I have one question that I have been trying to solve by reading the forums but it's been difficult to find the exact same question I have:
When I play the older games on my new TV the resolution looks terrible, obviously because they weren't designed for HD TVs (it's also 4:3 which doesn't bother me). With that being said, are there versions of the ROM that have been remastered to work on HD TVs, 4:3 or 16:9, and if so what is the website?
OR if there isn't such a thing, is there a way to make it so the picture quality is a little better by scaling down the image to its original size?
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@bmh0013 you can find an occasional remastered game, but you might find that using a shader gives a better look to the old games. The Pi CRT does a good job of creating the vintage appeal of scan lines and shadow masks of an old tube.
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@bmh0013 as stated by poster above the crt-pi shader is great. Removes the blocky-ness and adds scanlines. Looks great. @floob has a tutorial to enable shaders. I recommend sticking to the crt-pi shader for most emulators. Do not use an overlay if you are using the crt-pi shader though. Otherwise it looks really bad.
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@bmh0013 Depending on the game's original resolution and your tv /monitor you may get better results by trying different video settings thru libretro RGUI. In retroarch/libretro emulators (e.g. lr-mame) you access the RGUI menu with Select+X button combo on your gamepad; go to settings->video and play with "integer scaling" and "windowed scale" and "aspect ratio".
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Thanks so much for the info, I will definitely look into that. I turned on the smoothing option and it seemed to look better just a little blury. @caver01 Do you know if smoothing is ok to be used in combination with the shaders? Or should I turn that function off?
Thanks again guys!
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@bmh0013 The shaders aren't designed to be used with smoothing, but experiment. It all comes down to what looks best to you on your display.
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@Lyle_JP said in Better Quality gaming RetroPie3:
@bmh0013 The shaders aren't designed to be used with smoothing, but experiment. It all comes down to what looks best to you on your display.
Strictly speaking, this isn't true. Most shaders require smoothing off but some, like crt-pi, require it on. Ideally, to override the default setting, shaders will come with a glslp (or gcp for cg shaders) file which specifies whether they should have shading on or off. Multipass shaders will have one of these to specify their shader passes but single pass shaders can use them as well. All the crt-pi shader versions come with corresponding glslp files that specify smoothing on and it's these that should be used to select those shaders in Retroarch.
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@davej said in Better Quality gaming RetroPie3:
Strictly speaking, this isn't true. Most shaders require smoothing off but some, like crt-pi, require it on. Ideally, to override the default setting, shaders will come with a glslp (or gcp for cg shaders) file which specifies whether they should have shading on or off. Multipass shaders will have one of these to specify their shader passes but single pass shaders can use them as well. All the crt-pi shader versions come with corresponding glslp files that specify smoothing on and it's these that should be used to select those shaders in Retroarch.
Out of curiosity, is the crt-pi smoothing different than having the retroarch smoothing enabled via
video_smooth = true? I mean, obviously the shader is doing more than smoothing, but is the glslp going about it in a different, more effective way, or simply ensuring that while the shader is selected, smoothing is TRUE, regardless of the retroarch.cfg setting? -
@caver01 said in Better Quality gaming RetroPie3:
Out of curiosity, is the crt-pi smoothing different than having the retroarch smoothing enabled via
video_smooth = true? I mean, obviously the shader is doing more than smoothing, but is the glslp going about it in a different, more effective way, or simply ensuring that while the shader is selected, smoothing is TRUE, regardless of the retroarch.cfg setting?It's more complicated than that. Look at the diagram below:
Imagine the green line and the brown line are the centre of two scan lines. The standard smoothing (linear filtering) will blend between them as shown by the red lines. crt-pi fiddles with the blending factor so that it follows the blue line. The idea is that the blended colour stays as that of a scan line until just before it gets half way between two scan lines when it shoots across to being the colour of the next scan line. At exactly half way between the scan line centres there's a 50%/50% blend between them.
By default crt-pi's horizontal blending is linear. If you enable the sharper setting, it does a less severe version of the vertical blending.
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@davej Cool! Thanks for the visual. I figured that your shader was more advanced.
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