Composite crt slowdown

TANKARD

Hello I'm new to retropi, and have a problem. I have a raspberry pi running a fully updated emulation station and everything works fine. However I've always wanted to run it on a crt tv! Well I got myself a zune avi composite cord and did just that, however all games are running slow, like as if everything has a frame rate limit. The menu for flipping through the emulators and settings is just fine, but every game is slowed down. I dont know what to do. I heard I probably need to change settings in my config file to match the resolution of my tv, but I have not found anyone with an issue similar to mine yet online. Also as an added bonus of confusion, my model number of my tv cannot be found on google. It's a sony trinitron, model no kv-27ts22. It's a 27 inch with wood siding. 60hz made in 1989. cant find a thing about it so i dont know it's resolution.

LONG STORY SHORT I try to run emulators on my old tv and the games are slow and stuttery, like a frame limiter.

mitu

@TANKARD said in Composite crt slowdown:

It's a 27 inch with wood siding. 60hz made in 1989. cant find a thing about it so i dont know it's resolution.

CRT TVs don't have 'resolution' :). For such an old TV, you can find plenty of information online, including a service manual - but that's not important.

To configure the video output on your PI, the parameters you need to change/add are in the config.txt file, readable also from a PC from the SD card. See here for the official Raspbian documentation - but the TL;DR is that you need to add

sdtv_mode=16
stdv_aspect=1

to the file.

Regarding your slowdown, there are a few older topics here [1], with the solution being to use

audio_pwm_mode=0

in the configuration file.

[1] https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/17107/, https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/17864

TANKARD

That seemed to work. Games do not slow down now. Thanks for the help. The emulation station menu seems a little too wide for the tv, is there a way to fix that?

mitu

See the docs on Overscan.

Rion

@TANKARD @mitu

Custom configs for CRT using the built-in composite out

You can also tweak the runahead settings for 8bit/16bit consoles to further improve the input lag and use wired controllers.