What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?

BobHarris

I use a python script for background music in emulation station. I am at 183 tracks of 8 - 32 bit console video game music (can't think of any more). Such great music that I often spend a little more time lingering over the game list before I start one. :-)
I use a custom crt shader (one without the vertical lines artifact)
I'm a big Street Fighter fan, so I made a custom collection filled with all my Street Fighter games (snes, megadrive, psp, ps1, fba) and in Street Fighter 3 second impact I made two save states (Ken vs Ryu and Ryu vs Ken: both their final battles in arcade mode) so I can right away jump into my favorite two battles.
Enabling enhanced resolution for Crash Bandicoot 1,2,3, Wipeout 3 and Wipeout 2097. (I prefer the crt shader and lower resolution for my other ps1 games.)
I also added joystick control in almost all of my emulators, so I can use whatever i feel like for each game.
Most of the stuff already mentioned here. A lot of time went into setting up proper controls and visuals for each system.

Dwarfboysim

@capeman Hi what steps do you use to disable the overscan. When I disable it Emulation Station no longer fits on the screen properly and the bootup screen of the Pi doesn't either. I have used the overscan scale option in config.txt to overcome the onboot up options but how do you overcome ES not fitting properly?

Thanks,
Dwarfboysim

Capeman

@dwarfboysim I had the same issue when i disable overscan on mine, it stretched outside the bounds of my TV... then i remembered i had a stupid Samsung TV and it had it's own setting for overscan compensation. After i set my HDMI input on the tv to recognize as a PC input (which disables tv specific "features"), everything fit just fine. It's likely your TV, the pi puts out perfect 1080p resolution over HDMI with overscan disabled.

caver01

@capeman I had the same exact problem with my Samsung. It was cropping the image some, so I had to set it to a custom picture size (which worked automatically) that was't the built-in 16:9 even though it was that AR. Silly, but whatever.

hooperre

2 Questions Here:
@Capeman

turn off video smoothing

Care to share why you do that? Is that an ES or RA option?

@meleu
Is there any way to have the video font (for Cheevos) to sit on top of my overlays? I use some of the overlays mentioned here and they block any Cheevo notifications.

Thanks lads, cheers.

mitu

@hooperre said in What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?:

Care to share why you do that? Is that an ES or RA option?

It's a RetroArch option, it's under the 'Video' group (see https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Shaders-and-Smoothing).

hooperre

@mitu said in What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?:

@hooperre said in What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?:

Care to share why you do that? Is that an ES or RA option?

It's a RetroArch option, it's under the 'Video' group (see https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Shaders-and-Smoothing).

Doy. Thanks. I didn't realize the default was set as true. I'll have to experiment with that a bit more.

Dwarfboysim

@capeman took some fiddling with my LG TV but found the option and it works :)

Happy days!!

meleu

@hooperre said in What tweaks do you make to your RetroPie setup?:

@meleu
Is there any way to have the video font (for Cheevos) to sit on top of my overlays?

Unfortunately not. :/

At least none that I'm aware of.

40wattrange

@meleu What exactly are you doing to update retroarch from source?

jonnykesh

@40wattrange RetroPie Setup > Manage Packages > Core Packages > RetroArch > Update from Source.

40wattrange

@jonnykesh Thanks, didnt know if there was some other command line kung fu.

meleu

@40wattrange unfortunately this method doesn't get the bleeding edge version anymore.

I posted about it here and BuZz gave me the reason here.

jonnykesh

@meleu I would stick to the pre-built binaries, they usually have been tested.
Is there any way to check when a binary was compiled? Any ideas @meleu ?

meleu

@jonnykesh RGUI > Information > System Information > Build Date

jonnykesh

@meleu I use xmb does it work in that menu view? How about non-libretro emulators?
Is there not a way to include the binary build date along with the description for example?

BillyH

I've had RetroPie for two days now,and I've made the following tweaks:

video smoothing on all the emulators I use
made the window for the GBA emulator smaller (to 720x480, like in the doc, which I decided to start with and after trying decided was satisfactory)

Will experiment with some shaders later on, so if anyone feels like advising on this...

Doesn't really count as tweaking but since it wasn't in the auto image build: I also installed and updated the ScummVM package (and set it to OpenGL graphics) and I installed the package that makes Dinothawr run.

fabio78

@billyh never use video smoothing. Besides leaving the games looking hideous, like they've been smeared with wax, performance takes a hit, and on top of everything it creates a couple of frames of input lag.
If you want a less aliased look, switch that off and use the hq2x.cg shader instead. It looks more natural because you can still tell the pixels, and the image is a lot sharper.

BillyH

@fabio78 I like the smoothing option for now, makes the image more pleasant to look at - I wasn't able to count the pixels on my old box television either when I was playing SNES games. Smoothing gives it all a bit more of a 'drawn' look in my eyes, I think it looks very good for 16-bit games.

However, I'll check the shader you mentioned to see if it's preferable :-)

BillyH

@fabio78 Tried out some different shaders and in the end I went with the one that simulates CRT lines :-)