How To Run Games In Fullscreen Always?

RetroFreak89

Hey everyone

When i play games on the pi i notice that usually most games are always in 'windowed mode' why is that?
Doesnt fullscreen benefit more is there a way to make it fullscreen i tried to look around cant rly find anything only ratio and such..

caver01

@retrofreak89 I have a feeling that your experience is not the norm. I have literally NEVER seen any emulator run in windowed mode. Part of the reason is that there are no “windows” to run them in. I don’t know how you are setup because you did not share any of those details, but my system is built from the RetroPie image and there are no windows of any kind. It boots into Emulation Station and when I launch a game with an emulator (arcade game for example using lr-mame2003) it loads full screen. Same goes for NES, SNES, Atari2600 and so on.

You need to be a lot more specific about how exactly you are launching games and describe how your system is setup if we are going to be able to help.

RetroFreak89

@caver01 thats true it covers the whole screen yes but Its not rly full screen tho Its more like windowed but stretched out to fill ur tv screen i know this because i have a few game ports like doom and quake and via the command console it tells me its running windowed and ive seen this also with snes and stuff even tho it coveres your entire screen Its not really in fullscreen mode tho
Im also using Retropie latest version but if you check like your resolution settings ingame it will always tell you Its windowed even tho it covers the screen very weird ah well i guess thats how Retropie maybe is set up

caver01

@retrofreak89 it’s not windowed. You are talking about the aspect ratio. Most retro games were designed for old CRT screens that had a 4:3 aspect ratio. That is a lot different than modern 16:9 widescreen TVs. If you are using a TV, you might be seeing it stretch.

Again, you will need to add specific case details for anyone to help.

Darksavior

I was wondering too @RetroFreak89 . Anyone can check in the retroarch menu from any libretro emulator. It's always been that way..at least the 2yrs that I've used retropie.

mitu

I think there's a difference here between ROMs, which are always 'fullscreen' as far as the game is concerned - since there is no OS for old consoles - and the Ports, which are meant to be run as executables in an existing OS (and Windowing environment).
I suspect that for the Doom, DukeNukem3d the program thinks it's runing in a 'window' since there is no Window Manager available and they're executed in a framebuffer (SDL) window, so the concept of the 'fullscreen' does not apply.
@RetroFreak89 can you show a screenshot where you have the 'windowed mode' reported by the Port ? You can use the raspi2png utility to capture the exact output you have on the screen.

caver01

@mitu Whether or not @RetroFreak89 can produce a screenshot of some configuration area that says "windowed mode" is certainly interesting, but as you say, it's a product of how the emulator was built, not of how the image is actually displayed--there is no "windows" or analogous framework to worry about.

The symptoms I read are related to the aspect ratio which will not be fixed or adjusted by worrying about how the emulator thinks it is running. What we need to help here are specific cases and examples of how the game looks on the user's screen vs. how the use wants it to look.

An example could go something like this:

"When I play Joust using lr-mame2003, instead of it looking like a 4:3 aspect ratio like it does on an arcade CRT monitor, my game gets stretched across my entire HTDV 16:9 width <include screenshot>. It looks distorted. What I want are black bars down the left and right sides so that the graphics are drawn in the middle of the screen in the shape of a 4:3 rectangle."

Of course, this is not really my experience with Joust, but these kinds of details will allow us to help @RetroFreak89 troubleshoot. Notice that I named a specific ROM title, I named a specific emulator, and I pretended to include a screenshot with a description of how it looks vs. how it should look. Do this, and we can get somewhere.

Darksavior

He means the retroarch option called windowed full screen mode set to on and full screen mode set to off.

caver01

@darksavior I understand that, but there is no environment running to support a window in the first place, so the setting is meaningless. Either way, it is still filling the screen. The way I read the description was that it looks stretched.