Best way to output SCART (RGB) from Pi 3?
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@mikechi2 said in Best way to output SCART (RGB) from Pi 3?:
Holy cow! Are you saying the settings messed up your TV?
Well, maybe not THE settings - these are harmless, it was some unholy combination of the Integer On and maybe Aspect Ratio/Windowed Scale values - causing my Custom Viewport resolution to increase 3 or 4 - fold.
And when your TV dies in the exact moment when that happens - displaying an "overload" error - than it's extremely unlikely to be a coincidence ;)
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If I may chime in, I've done a RGB to SCART cable (would also work with PVMs) and shared my settings if anyone's intersted:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/8476/retropie-240p-15-khz-rgb-scart-tv-guide
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I couldn't resist and I got another CRT TV in. Life without one is just kinda bland ;)
Over last few weeks I was back in the Settings mode, trying to coax something out of these endless variations without much more success than before. Best I could do was a perfect (aka 1:1 pixels and filled screen) NeoGeo and sort-of-okay Megadrive. I also have a Wii and had more luck there with perfect Megadrive, SNES and NES. Wii however struggles with arcade and the emulation quality seems slightly weaker regarding aforementioned platforms- hence I persist with RPi.
So I went and tried the 1600px solution. It is sort of intimidating at first - but, by gods, it works! For the record, I'm on Pi2Scart and a 29" Trinitron TV. I did disable the dpi_output_format=519 line however apart from that the settings are unchanged, including the onend & onstart files. Not sure why AF folk say the bit depth is wrong in these, the IQ looks fine.
So, the 1600 fix works - on SNES, NeoGeo and NES. The doggone Master System doesn`t for some reason. The horizontal resolution is letterboxed when using the recommended Tink settings. Does it work for you guys who tried this solution? And any ideas why it fails on my setup? I have a similar problem on Wii as well, the best I could do there (and on RPi with non-Tink timings) is a centered but shrunk image with black bars all round.
Also curious if anybody tried microcomputers like ZX Spectrum/CPC/C64 to get to work using 1600px fix. In my case it fails, I tried to follow the template from other settings like SNES, but somehow it doesn't register and screen looks like a squashed vertical column, very narrow. I don't think the retroarch.cfg from core directories is being read for some reason (the one with #include line). Any ideas most appreciated.
EDIT: Some progress. I managed to get the assorted emu's core retroarch.cfg files to "activate" - it happened after setting SAVE ON EXIT to ON while in the RetroArch options (while in the emu). After that, the configs filled up with all the usual options (no more #include line) and now can be tweaked. It's also possible to sort the resolutions from within the emu's though that involves fiddling with the Integer/Custom Aspect/Custom Viewport settings - something I'm still convinced killed off my previous TV. So, proceed with caution.
However, it's all worth it...to see proper ZX Spectrum gfx on a CRT - 1st time in 30+ years - is something hard to describe. Incredible stuff. And arcade games, well, it's just simply
mindblowing - 2D art at its absolute best.These settings work for me now:
ZX Spectrum: CAR Width - 1600; CAR Height - 240
Amstrad CPC: CAR Width - 1536; CAR Height - 272 ......not actually perfect 1:1 but seems to work, seeing as Amstrad had a border, and actual game screen is fine
PC Engine: CAR Width - 1504; CAR Height - 240 .......1504 is odd, since it`s not a "proper" multiplier, but it works without any artifacts.This leaves the (cursed) Mastersystem and Commodore 64 - the latter being an odd animal since you need to install Vice separately and it doesn't seem to fall into regular RetroArch jurisdiction - own menu and config. I tried to edit the config, but the pic remains squashed horizontally. And, of course there`s the arcade jungle - some games worked fine, but most didn't, anyway, it's a challenge for next weekend.
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Mastersystem is letterboxed by nature, the difference is on real hardware the border has the same colour as the background, Mastersystem's native resolution is 256x192
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Ha! A border, you say. That would explain this quagmire...I know it`s 192px, just thought that maybe it somehow automagikally got stretched to fullscreen on a real one. I actually owned a Master System briefly about 15 years ago but don't remember any display details.
Just wish somebody mentioned this earlier, would save me a lot of time messing with the settings ;) However, why is this "border" not emulated?
Also, it's time to face the music, aka the Arcade Chaos. Any ideas on how to tackle this? Your post linked earlier says you set up resolutions "temporarily" for each game, which is something I was also doing, but that's a major hassle. Is there no way to set separate resolution for every title, which are then saved for later - maybe in this start-up menu: "Edit custom retroarch.cfg for this ROM"?
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I am using the PI2scart adapter and I've tried the 1600 width hack. The in game menus of Retroarch are really stretched and It's impossible to navigate the menus and make per game modifications because I can barely see what I have picked in the menu. How do I change the width of specifically the Retroarch menus?
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You need to edit all the retroarch.cfg files for the different systems when using a 1600 width, you can find the config files under /configs/ and then the respective system. Here's an example of the Nes config file that should work.
Settings made here will only override settings in the global retroarch.cfg if placed above the #include line
input_remapping_directory = "/opt/retropie/configs/nes/"
aspect_ratio_index = "22"
video_smooth = "false"
video_scale_integer = "true"
video_threaded = "false"
custom_viewport_width = "1600"
custom_viewport_height = "224"
custom_viewport_x = "0"
custom_viewport_y = "0"#include "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg"
The you just need to edit the other config files and add the corrent custom_viewport_width and custom_viewport_height for each system you have.
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@Dalton69 to be more specific it is the Retroarch menus, in game, that are being stretched out and not the gameplay. Before I updated Retroarch the menus where scaled in integer mode accordingly to the games custom viewport and everything was readable.
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Ok, well the menus should look ok at 1600 as long as the resolution in the config.txt is set at the same. So what's the resolution setting in the config.txt file then? You can run two scripts to set a specific resolution before the game start to 1600 and then back to what ever is in your config.txt file as ES looks a bit weird at such a high resolution.
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@Dalton69 I already have those onstart and onend scripts. I can only find the framebuffer resolution in the config file and I've already changed that...
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It's a bizarre behaviour, I've never seen the in-game menu behave like that, in my case it always corresponds to the game resolution. This was problematic when the game itself was shrunk - before editing the custom_viewport and/or aspect/integer - I could only read the menu then because of my huge 29" display. Or, when the resolutions were going into 2x (or higher) mode, the menu was super stretched then and unusable.
I also recently "updated" through wifi but nothing has changed.
So, if you're saying that the game displays fine while the menu is messed up then I haben't a clue what's the reason. Recommend starting from scratch with a clean image/settings.
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If it helps, this is how it looks. Very stretched out vertically but also a little horizontally.
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Well I would say it's due to the fact you have aspect ratio = core provied. It should be custom so if you try the retroarch.cfg settings I posted for say Nes or change it to whatever system you are having issues with and then set the appropriate custom_viewport_width and custom_viewport_height then it should be fine provided that you have 1600px set in the onstart script.
I can also see that you are trying to use the psx emulator, is that the only one having issue or all emulators?
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@Dalton69 that was changed to custom aspect shortly after the screenshot, but it still looks the same. Regardless of what emulator I use it looks like that.
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It doesn't really look just stretched - more like elements are all over the place.
Maybe try different theme in ES. I'm using Pixel-TFT, heard other ones have problems.
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Strange indeed but must be something with the set up then and the different files. Are you using the lastest 0.6.8 version of the onstart script? Also please post the content one of the retroarch.cfg for any of the systems you are having issues with then we can take it from there.
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Okay, so I'm facing the final frontier regarding 1600 px hack (using Pi2SCARt+ CRT TV) - vertical MAME games. The horizontal ones are mostly fine. I'd like to display the vertical ones properly , without having to turn my 50kg TV on the "length" side every time.
Problem is, the vert resolutions are bigger than the 240 that's in my config now, so even though horizontally they scale properly while in 1:1, there are big chunks missing on the top and bottom. I've been told by Grandmaster Fudoh himself to "put the Pi in 480i mode" so the vertical stuff would fit. I know that black bars on both sides are inevitable in this setup, but I can live with that.
I'm not quite sure how to go about this though. I assume it involves preparing a separate SD card with new config just for that - PITA, but the cause is worth it. What values do I change? I assume it's got to be the ol' hdmi_timings and dpi_mode/group?
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@maxriptide said in Best way to output SCART (RGB) from Pi 3?:
that sort of converter (HDMI-VGA) introduces a slight lag so
maxriptide what kind of lag do you mean - something like playing on LCD or more?
I have already build arcade stick and looking for a way to connect it to CRT so my idea was to use this converter and UMSA not to redevelop or make any mods of my project. Could you give me some more detail? -
@melvin-fox, it is nowhere like LCD lag. We're talking about approximately 06 ms I come up with manual test input lag of 240p Test Suite (which is a subjective test) in the pc engine emulator. It might be due to the cheap HDMI-VGA adapter I was using.
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