Solved .... Retropie / Pi 4 will not display on old model TV

Red_Trev

Just a quick post to help anyone with the same frustrating issue .... I obtained an old Samsung flat screen TV for free & wanted to use it for Retropie gaming. Tested it out & my Android box worked perfect on it.

I have a Pi model 4 with 8GB of RAM, with official power supply & micro HDMI cable. Used the official Raspberry Pi Imager software to flash a micro SD card with latest version of Retropie.

Plugged all in & turned on the Pi, got a BLANK SCREEN. I removed the micro SD card & tried again, was now able to see the Pi boot screen, therefore it was not a hardware issue. Retropie also booted fine on a brand new TV, so it was a specific problem with the old Samsung model.

After some research I found out that the Pi emits a low powered signal that older TVs struggle to pick up. I followed the advice in this article (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md) and modified the "config.txt" file on the micro SD card.

To access this file , simply put the micro SD card in an adapter, plug into your laptop, open the micro SD via file explorer, then right click on "config.txt" file & select Open With > Notepad . You should then see something similar to this: https://pastebin.com/e9ahJAZ1

Next, change line 6 to hdmi_safe=1 (i.e.) delete the '#' . Then click Save.

This sets the Video output to "safe mode", that has settings used to try to boot with maximum HDMI compatibility. I then inserted the micro SD card back into the Pi & switched it on, Retropie was displayed but with basic image quality.

I then edited the file to disabled safe mode (by changing the line back to # hdmi_safe=1 ) and used trial & error to find the the video settings that work for my specific model of TV. This took a few attempts of editing / saving / boot up PI / etc ...

The following are the settings I finally ended up with (remember to remove the '#' in front of each setting before saving):

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_ignore_edid=0xa5000080
config_hdmi_boost=7
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=16
disable_overscan=0
overscan_left=0
overscan_right=0
overscan_top=0
overscan_bottom=0

An explanation of what the settings do:

hdmi_force_hotplug=1 ..... HDMI output mode will be used, even if no monitor is detected
hdmi_ignore_edid=0xa5000080 ...... enables the ignoring of EDID/display data
config_hdmi_boost=7 ...... signal strength of the HDMI interface, possible values are 0 to 11
hdmi_group=2 ..... '2' is DMT
hdmi_mode=16 ....... '16' is 1024x768___60Hz___4:3
disable_overscan=0 ...... use default value of overscans
overscan_left=0 ...... the number of pixels to add left / right / etc ...
overscan_right=0
overscan_top=0
overscan_bottom=0

ferhound

@red_trev by old model samsung you mean crt or lcd?

Red_Trev

@ferhound flatscreen, LED i think

jamrom2

@ferhound said in Solved .... Retropie / Pi 4 will not display on old model TV:

@red_trev by old model samsung you mean crt or lcd?

Lol... I was thinking the same. Old style TV is channel knobs and knob volume on a wood grain cased CRT.

Thorr69

@jamrom2 Yeah. 'Old flatscreen' means a Sony Trinitron CRT with no curved glass not an LED screen. Hell even a plasma screen would be kinda old.

jamrom2

@thorr69 Well.. if you know what this does... "we're old"... if you don't... then "I'm old"... lol. :D

Thorr69

@jamrom2 Definitely. When the cable company upgraded to the 'slide' version, I played with it endlessly. slide box