Changing video orientation and adjusting screen size

delirium_cordia

I am running Retropie 4.4 on a raspberry pi 3 in an old Dynamite Cop cabinet. I'm having issues with a monitor that fits and someone has suggested using a 43" LED rotated 90 degrees and adusting the video size to fit. Is it possible to do this with Retropie?

rkoster

Yes.

You can rotate EmulationStation (the interface) and all the games by editing /boot/config.txt. This will cause some performance slowdown, however. You'll want to google for the specific values for which way you have your monitor rotated.

You can rotate only the games using a Retroarch option, as long as you stick to Libretro cores (the ones prefixed with lr-). But then your UI will be on its side if you use EmulationStation.

You can use the AttractMode front-end instead of EmulationStation; it supports vertical modes.

Personally, I rotated using the config.txt method, and it works well enough for me; there's some tearing but it's not bad given careful other settings.

mitu

Emulationstation also supports screen rotation (at the application level, like RetroArch), using a command line parameter (--screenrotate). More details here.

rkoster

@mitu Only in ES-dev, though, right? Or has that changed?

mitu

@rkoster ES-dev is pretty much on parity with the current stable version. The dev branch has been merged to stable on February this year, so this feature should work on the normal ES version, if it was updated in the last 4 months.

delirium_cordia

This helps a lot, thank you. I can adjust the screen size with Overscan, correct?

mitu

@delirium_cordia Actually, you can also control it from Emulationstation - see this topic.

delirium_cordia

Thank you, Mitu. I'm still new to all this, so fumbling my way around.

mitu

@delirium_cordia RetroPie (and the Raspberry PI and other SBCs) are all about tinkering and learning new things. No need to rush things if you're not in a hurry - ask away in the forums if you cannot find the answer in the Docs.