Aspect ratio question

Macon Ebbs

I'm not running things in my normal environment, so please pardon missing details, but would love some detailed insight to the workings of things based on my description here that may point me in the right direction.

I'm connecting my pie to a samsung TV, which at first wasn't working right, it wouldn't detect (this is just background info). I worked around this by using an hdmi to composite adapter, which resulted in everything displaying in full screen, menu, games, so long as I set the TV to full screen (to not stretch). I had some issues with borders, so I started modifying the overscan settings in the /boot/config.txt file, and tweaked things to my liking. Some time later, I was showing things off to a friend, and he asked about going direct hdmi, I connected it to show him the error, and to my surprise, it worked perfectly. It's possible I changed something else without realizing it, but as far as I remember, the only setting I touched in this environment was the overscan, and by enabling that, it seems that fixed my hdmi issue.

So that's just background info.

After this, I found that my emulations were displayed too narrow. I set the TV back to widescreen mode, and everything worked fine. Games are emulated properly in full screen, menu is widescreen. Which is fine.

but now my problem comes to vs. super mario brothers in mame-libretro.

I'm finding that vs. super mario brothers displays too narrow, as if it's displaying in a pillbox for widescreen on a TV set to fullscreen, adding double bars to the edge. However, the TV is set to widescreen, as detailed above. Other arcade games I use are classics that typically display more narrow (donkey kong, qbert), because the original would be a sideways screen in a cabinet.

I seem to be in some sort of display mode that is not what I was used to before (enabling overscan did this?) where games are automatically pillboxed, so my menu is wide, but games are correct, and something is assuming all mame-libretro games should be narrower, while vs. super mario brothers shouldn't be?

I'm sorry if documentation somewhere points me to specific settings somewhere, best I can figure I need to modify something to be game specific to set vs. super mario bros. to not use a correction setting or something, but the tab settings from the game just give me things like button mappings and such.

Any thoughts on this, or something that could point me in the right direction?

Many thanks in advance.

Macon.

Floob

I'd check this out so you can post more info:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

Then, because above you have said you have made various changes but not detailed what I would be tempted to write a fresh image to your SD card and take one step at a time.
You can also see this to force the HDMI connection:
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Video-Issues

Then you need to decide if you want games to display in their correct aspect ratio, or if you want to force them to be strecthed across the full display area of the TV. You can manage the aspect ratio settings here:
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Configuration-Editor

Macon Ebbs

Cool, thanks, I'll play around with those settings.

dankcushions

This post is deleted!

ferdnand

@Macon-Ebbs , set your video inside retropie to 16/9, ratio, when your game starts to load, hit a key , then look for video settings for emulator , then select 16/9, this will fix everything... let me know