Rotating Emulationstation GUI for Vertical Screen

JRX88

Hi,

I know there are lots of topics on setting up Retropie for vertical screens but a lot of them are inconclusive or use the 'display_rotate=1' method which causes a performance hit. Instead I am trying to just rotate the Emulationstation GUI to display on a vertically orientated monitor and let Retroarch do the rotation for games which works fine already.

The issue is that when adding '--screenrotate 1' to the autostart.sh file although Emulationstation does rotate the GUI it is not doing so in a way that makes the GUI usable in a vertical monitor, it just displays a cropped horizontal 16:9 GUI at the top of the vertical screen. It's hard to describe succinctly the result so I'll link a picture instead:

https://imgur.com/ChtZX1g

At first I thought this was just because I wasn't using a vertical theme but I've changed to a vertical theme too and there is no difference. I feel like Emulationstation still renders the GUI for 16:9 whereas it needs to be 9:16. Is this just what the '--screenrotate 1' function does, I'm not sure what use it is if so? Is there any other way of getting a vertical GUI from Emulationstation without the 'display_rotate=1' config edit?

Look forward to hearing if anyone else has had any success with this, hoping I am just missing something obvious!

Pi Model or other hardware: 4B
Power Supply used: Official Raspberry Pi USB-C PSU
RetroPie Version Used (eg 3.6, 3.8.1, 4.1 - do not write latest): 4.6
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie website

mitu

You should specify the resolution for ES when rotating, via the --resolution W H parameter.

JRX88

Thanks for that @mitu, that has helped with ES rendering the GUI vertically however it seems the origination point for the GUI render is off screen somewhere as I'm only getting half the GUI displayed. Is there documentation of all the ES launch arguments somewhere? I imagine I'm looking for a viewport x y argument or something.

Many thanks.

mitu

@JRX88 See here. The parameters would be --screensize W H --screenoffset X Y.

JRX88

Excellent, the --screensize parameter did the trick!

For posterity and anyone searching in the future, for my 1280x720 screen rotated counter clockwise to vertical the following in autostart.sh means ES renders the GUI vertically:

emulationstation --screenrotate 1 --screensize 720 1280 #auto

No need for resolution and offset parameters.

Thanks @mitu !

JRX88

Caveat to this solution - the above parameters seem to break the scraper UI, when selecting 'scrape now' it crashes to the command line. Removing the parameters and scraping works fine again.

mitu

@JRX88 That's interesting, have to give it a try.

retropiecorcoran

@JRX88 @mitu Thank you both! Been looking this for a while.