720p or 1080p

chipsnblip

Bit offtopic, but I did have to disable the crt-pi shader on my pi2 on a 720p tv because it looked really bad. It looks like someone ran over the screen with crt-pi tire marks or something...I don't think the shader was made for 720 or maybe a scaling issue since the tv's hdmi ports only handle 720p/1080i but the vga port will do 1366x768. Forcing the output to either 720p or 1080i did not help.

i experienced this same thing with my older 720p TV, where the native resolution was 1360x768. editing the /boot/config.txt with:

hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=39

fixed the scaling issues with the crt-pi shaders.

Riverstorm

@davej said in 720p or 1080p:

I wrote crt-pi because there wasn't a decent CRT shader that ran well at 1080p.

Thank god for that. I was perfectly fine running most of the MAME games I enjoy in mame4all as it does have a bit more flexibility when configuring controls but I had to switch to mame2003 exclusively (except vector games--and a few that only work in AdvMAME) to take advantage of crt-pi as it's truly a slice of heaven, love that shader.

crt-pi needs about 4 screen pixels to display one game pixel and still look reasonable.

That's interesting and explains a few things on recommended minimum resolution.

Also the other information helps to know there's a little wiggle room for tweaking and testing with clocks and resolution if a game isn't running up to par with crt-pi.

@dankcushions said in 720p or 1080p:

after seeing some games without the shader i suddenly decided i prefer the crisp pixelly image without the shader.. for this month, anyway :)

Agreed! I've been doing that with Atari and NES but the MAME emulators are always crt-pi especially with those polished vertical cfg's with the custom aspect ratios. :)

caver01

This is great info even for those of us who are not using standard HD video resolutions. Anyone building an arcade cabinet using dirt cheap 17 or 19-inch LCDs typically find them running 1280x1024 resolution, and although 1024p is not 1080p, it's certainly better than 720, and I can definitely attest to how nice the CRT-PI shader looks at 1024.

It's also handy to know that the shader looks best when it has 4x game resolution to render the scanline and shadow mask effects. This has come up in a few other threads over the past few months--people building hand-held devices that have tiny screens sometimes ask about using the CRT-PI shader. I had always thought you would need extra pixels to make the CRT effect look nice. I guess my advice was sound. Good info all around.