240p Composite Settings.

[arslayer]

I have been using RetroPie with my Pi3 for a little over a year now and decided to take the plunge with 240p over composite hooked up to a CRT TV. I followed the guide on this thread and got everything looking pretty decent for a bit. My retroarch config setttings are:

video_smooth = false
video_crop_overscan = false
video_driver = "gl"
video_shader_enable = true
video_shader_dir = "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/shaders/"
video_shader = "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/shaders/pi_iq_horz_nearest_vert.glslp"
aspect_ratio_index = 22
video_fullscreen_x = "720"
video_fullscreen_y = "480"
custom_viewport_width = "660"
custom_viewport_height = "448"
custom_viewport_x = "25"
custom_viewport_y = "16"

... Pretty much copy and pasted from that guide. I have disable_overscan=1 set in /boot/config.txt as well. I started with a pretty smooth Composite picture, but after tweaking aspect ratios in rgui and restarting games I am noticing very sharp edges around things (mainly snes and genesis). I thought I may have somehow disabled the shader, but did not. I did try turning the shader off and clicking apply changes. I couldn't tell the difference between the shader being on or off. Maybe I'm crazy and the picture wasn't any better before I started messing with stuff, but my eyes don't lie to me that much. I moved the "sharpness" setting on the TV down to zero, but that didn't seem to help much. If anyone has any suggestions on what I may have done I'd appreciate it. I realize that RetroTink is a better option than the 3.5mm out on the pi, but I don't have the $ for one at the moment.

[chipsnblip]

i'm in the process of going through the same guide for my little 13" crt and couldn't be happier with the picture thus far. i'm doing it core by core, but some games still need slight tweaking of the horizontal scaling/position to center them on the screen. maybe my tv is too small to notice any glaring issues. so far i've done nes, snes, and genesis and they are looking pretty good. i've noticed some games with a lot of dithering like earthworm jim (genesis) need to be run through blargg's NTSC filter to help with massive scaling artifacts, but maybe i just have something misconfigured.

is your problem with any particular core or game? the sharp lines you describe sound like incorrect 'custom aspect ratio height'. do you see crawling lines of pixels everywhere when there is in-game scrolling? as far as i know, the shader will eliminate that as long as aspect ratio height is set properly.

at any rate, i highly recommend checking out the 240p test suite which has roms for various consoles, that can help identify issues like this.

are the runcommand-onstart/end scripts executing successfully? if you want to post your full retroarch.cfg and /boot/config.txt we can take a look.

[arslayer]

Well, I ended up starting from a fresh install and followed the guide. Everything looks okay again. The only height I had to adjust was for fceumm as I disabled the mask vertical overscan (set to 480 instead of 448). I have no idea what I did to break it the last time, but it was probably something I put in my config. That or disabling and re-enabling the shader a million times to spot the differences messed something up :). The runcommand scripts are executing. The text is unreadable when it goes into progressive scan mode. Here are my current retroarch.cfg and config.txt settings. Pretty vanilla per guide. I am definitely going to check out that 240p test suite, and if you have any other suggestions I am happy to hear them. I need to leave my stuff alone, but I like messing with things (even if I have no idea what I'm doing).

[chipsnblip]

i'm the same way, messing with things (and usually breaking them). it's a good way to learn, hands on :)

the only notable difference in our configs is video_threaded = "true", which i have set to false because it tends to cause frame-stutter and some input latency.

keep a close eye on the configs in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/config/<core>, maybe something (core-options) was overriding/conflicting with your retroarch.cfg.