OK, I finally got it fixed. and I really should have looked at this first, so I'm sorry for putting everyone who looked at this on a wild goose chase. But I've been putting off working on this because I've had other projects and while I can rebuild, I didn't want to. But the overscan didn't work, it would not pull it to the left like I wanted, I made sure the TV was on game mode and not stretching or adding any post processing. I had a spare TV and wanted to rule out the TV, and behold I seen this
IMG_20231028_182219.jpg
I commented out the hdmi_drive=2 and it all works.
I'm not even going to pretend I know what was going on, but my guess the damaged connector was pushing sound through what was left working of the cable and had to push the video to the side to make room for that. I dunno, but new cord, and verified it's working. I'm going to buy some backup HDMI cables just in case and really try to come up with a better solution to where I sit the Retropie

That's it, thanks.

That was it! I must've changed that either by accident at some point, or sometime a while ago and not remembered. But either way, I went to the Runcommand menu and chose 'Remove video mode selection' and now it's working perfectly. Thanks!

@philipmather ditto /opt/retropie-player1/e...s.../scripts/inputconfigurations.sh has hard coded rootdir.

So, this is where we reach the limit of what I might be able to do remotely. The picture looks to be the effect of Horizontal size setting needing adjustment. If there are no other pot adjustment knobs then you may have to look for jumpers to make adjustments.

With that said have you plugged in a more current monitor to see if the effect goes away? Just to make sure it is not some setting in the Pi that is causing it.

below is a clipping from a crt trouble shooting site.

"Horizontal size should be set so that there is about 10-15 percent overscan left and right. This will allow ample margin for power line voltage fluctuations, component aging, and the reduction in raster size that may occur with some VCR special effects (fast play) modes.

Many sets no longer have any horizontal size adjustments and depend on accurate regulation of the voltage to the horizontal output stage to control horizontal size. There may be a B+ adjustment to perform first.

On those that do, the adjustment may either be done by setting the B+ voltage, by a pot, or a width coil in series with the horizontal deflection coils.

Modern sets do not generally have any linearity control but you may find this on older models. You will need to go back and forth between size and linearity as these adjustments are usually not independent.

Some of the newest sets control all these parameters via settings in non-volatile memory and use service menus accessed via the remote control for nearly all setup adjustments."

OK I don't know if this is the best way of doing this but it seems to be working. The new config files were saving to configs/all/retroarch/config. The retroarch file being looked at is in gba/retroarch.cfg. I simply copied the content of the new config file and overwrote the content in retroarch.cfg with the new data. I kept back ups of the original files in case anything goes haywire. So far it seems to be just fine. Thanks.

@retrocraze you may try to set the resolution you want (smaller than your tv native resolution) in the config.txt file and, in your tv video aspect options menu, set "original" or something similar, depending on your tv brand.