Squashed vertical screen

DougA

System : Pi4B (4GB)
Retropie version : 4.7.1
Display: Vertically rotated lcd (1280x1024 resolution)
System being used : MAME 2003

Hi,
I built a vertical cabinet about 3 years ago that my wife condemned to stay in the garage pretty much as soon as it was completed, and it rotted there until I redecorated a bedroom that my kids no longer sleep in. Now I have brought the cabinet in and tried to get it working again. During it’s time in the garage, the Pi3B that was running it got plundered for another project, so I installed a 4B instead, and this is where I am having issues. I have managed to get Emulation Station rotated and working properly, and games running under MAME 2003 rotated, but all of the vertical games I used previously are now squashed down to work at what appears to be a landscape 4:3 ratio in the middle of the screen. The Retroarch config screen is stubbornly refusing to rotate at all, as are all of the other config screens. I can live with that, but does anyone have an idea how I stretch the games back to their correct aspect ratio? I read a post where the solution was to set the aspect ratio to “core decides”, but I already had that set. Do I have to set each game’s aspect ratio manually, and if so, how and where?

DougA

@douga Update: I managed to improve the situation somewhat by replacing the Retroarch video aspect ratio setting “core decides” with 3:4, which should stretch the image off the top and bottom of my 4:5 ratio screen, but actually makes the display roughly square. It’s still clearly not behaving as it did when I had the system running on a Pi 3B though.

Ok, sorted this out on my own now. Counterintuitively, if I force the aspect ratio to 4:3 it sets it on the vertical screen to 3:4, or rather 4:5.

IanDaemon

@douga The Pi3 is quite different from the Pi4 when it comes to rotating the screen. The Pi3 lets you rotate the display 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees. I think the Pi4 only lets you rotate the screen 0 and 180 degrees. I don't have a Pi4, but I've avoided "upgrading" for this very reason.

I believe a performance hit was mentioned as the reason. You could always use shaders in Retroarch to produce the visual affect you desire.

DougA

@iandaemon The Pi4 does let you rotate in 90 degree increments, though it is nowhere near as simple to do so as on previous generations of Pi. After a couple of days of fiddling, I have Emulation station and Retroarch rotated 90 degrees and (finally) filling the screen. I don’t have the setup menus rotated yet, though. At least on the MAME games I have checked so far, there are no obvious performance issues in doing it.