Poor Graphics - Street of Rage II on Retropies Megadrive Emulator ?

shredman

Hi,

installed streets of rage 2 rom on my retropie (4.3.12) megadrive emulator and get very poor in game graphics. tried to set the shader option in /opt/retropie/configs/megadrive/retroarch.cfg file but this has no effect. still poor graphics.

pi@raspberrypi:/opt/retropie/configs/megadrive $ cat retroarch.cfg

Settings made here will only override settings in the global retroarch.cfg if placed above the #include line

input_remapping_directory = "/opt/retropie/configs/megadrive/"
video_smooth = "false"
video_shader_enable = "true"
#include "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg"

all arcade games that I play with emulationstaion on my raspberrypi Pi3 have very nice graphics. What can I do to get better graphics with megadrive or snes roms ? There are any special settings that I have to setup ? who can help ?

Regards,
Frank

mitu

@shredman Please give more info about your setup - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

shredman

Raspberry Pi 3 Modell B with Playstation PS3 Dualshock Controller
LG55 LM960V

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ hostnamectl
Static hostname: raspberrypi
Icon name: computer
Machine ID: 9ae2a0d3fc9c4dee9ff54179762425f0
Boot ID: ca173ef1f5024e7abb4664178481b761
Operating System: Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)
Kernel: Linux 4.14.34-v7+
Architecture: arm

pi@raspberrypi:/opt/retropie/configs/megadrive $ cat emulators.cfg
lr-genesis-plus-gx = "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-genesis-plus-gx/genesis_plus_gx_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/megadrive/retroarch.cfg %ROM%"
lr-picodrive = "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-picodrive/picodrive_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/megadrive/retroarch.cfg %ROM%"
default = "lr-genesis-plus-gx"

MAME0.78_ROMs are looking very nice , only megadrive and snes emulator games are terrible. This must have something to do with the emulator settings but I don't know where to setup ?

mitu

@shredman You didn't give all the details - are you using the RetroPie image or a 3rd party image ? Have you looked over the Shaders and Smoothing section of the docs ?

zerojay

What does "poor graphics" even mean?

shredman

installed an raspian Image [2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch.img] to the Pi and after that, installed retropie with this installation guide.

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/

mitu

@shredman The version you have installed is not compatible with Stretch, either start with the latest image (4.4) or upgrade RetroPie using the setup script to have a supported system. Also, what @zerojay said.

shredman

@zerojay said in Poor Graphics - Street of Rage II on Retropies Megadrive Emulator ?:

What does "poor graphics" even mean?

poor graphics means that the walls an streets in streets of rage 2 are very rough, pixel and a lot of vertical lines. Cannot describe it good but it looks not good. Compared to other emulationstation emulators like mame, it looks very bad and I believe it results from wrong or missing settings.

mitu

@shredman Can you share a screenshot ? Pause the game and take a screenshot within RetroArch (Select + X). You can find the screenshot in \\retropie\configs\all\retroarch (I think), accessing it over the network from your PC.
Plus, you can't really compare arcade games to genesis/snes, they're different technologies and arcades at the time looked better than home consoles. Look up a walkthrough of SoR2 on megadrive on Youtube and compare to what you see on your screen.

zerojay

I think this is probably a case of someone that doesn't know what videogames actually looked like back in the day, especially if he's complaining about pixels. lol

shredman

@mitu
2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch.img was the starting image and has been constantly updated with sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade. Did you mean that I have to update the restropie separately with the setup script ? thought that apt-get do this

mitu

@shredman https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/

shredman

@zerojay Thats a joke. I know how videogames looked at the old days and have played a lot of them in the past. I was a teen when the first arcade machines come out ... ;-)

shredman

@mitu thx. after backing up with rsync I will give it a try.

BobHarris

Did you use the crt-pi shader?
That shader and video smoothing (bilinear filtering in the video settings) turned on gives imo a pretty good image quality, comparable to s-video quality.
No smoothing is often too sharp and pixelated for me.

steptoe

Update RetroPie to the latest 4.4, newer sources and emulators updated plus its running Debian Stretch now

Try installing 'DGEN' for the megadrive via the RetroPie menu and set the option 'x2'. Copied from the DGEN quick docs :

F5
Toggles “TV Modes”: blur, scanline, interlace, swab, off

F6
Toggles “Scale” Modes: hqx, scale2x, default (NONE)

Try scanlines to reduce blocking a bit, the x2 video mode should make a big difference. The PI3 should still run all games at full speed as the megadrive isn't that powerful (compared to now)

lostless

I know sega genesis developers used a lot of graphic techniques like dithering and mixing colors that would wash out on a CRT that smooth out the image, due to the low color pallet. Something that arcade games did not have to do really. The vertical lines could just be the old dithering lines that you are really not supposed to see. Its like the water falls in sonic the hedgehog. on an emulator they are striped, but when played on a CRT, the stripes blend together and the waterfall looks like its see though.

shredman

@bobharris Hi. first, I updated to 4.4 and played around with retroarch shader options. Now, I use crt-pi or waterfall shader with megadrive emulator and I'm satisfied with it. I tried setup a retroarch hotkey [SELECT + DPAD up / down] with my PS3 Dualshock Controller for shader next and shader prev option but it doesnt work. Does anyone know the right hotswitch entry for retroarch.conf

pi@raspberrypi:/opt/retropie/configs/megadrive $ grep input_shader_next *
retroarch.cfg:input_shader_next = "m"
retroarch.cfg:input_shader_next_btn = "0"
retroarch.cfg:input_shader_next_axis = "nul"
retroarch.cfg:input_shader_next_mbtn = "nul"