Quality video raspberry

A Former User

Hello,
Why is the quality of games better on a windows PC than a raspberry?
I have try with Gameboy advantage and snes games.
I have a full hd 42inch television and quality is bad, I mean I have many square blocks on games. why?

Zigurana

Try to enable video smoothing.
Some ppl consider more blocky to be more pleasing on the eye, it's a preference thing, but it's really grating if it's not to your liking (like marmite).

A Former User

Can someone post here the config of retroarch.cfg for snes?

rbaker

@Sathumax said in Quality video raspberry:

I have a full hd 42inch television and quality is bad, I mean I have many square blocks on games. why?

The answer to this is quite simple. Let's take the SNES as an example. I think most games used to run at 256x224. So on your full HD tv at 1920x1080, you are obviously going to see square blocks as it is not a CRT with scan lines. The graphics will be pixel perfect and hence will look blocky as you describe so you need to apply some retro enhancements to make your tv set look old school. Luckily there are many, one of which is video smoothing as described above. The other is to use shaders and overlays. Research on this site will lead to multiple tutorials on these enhancements. Here are some links:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/1035/how-to-make-vector-arcade-games-look-their-best/2

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2053/using-mame-overlays-bezels-and-shaders-with-retroarch-in-retropie

Meanwhile, in response to your request, here is the entry of my config to use the excellent pi-crt shader that works with all libretro emulators. I prefer this over video smoothing.

# Smoothens picture with bilinear filtering. Should be disabled if using pixel shaders.
video_smooth = "true"

or

# Path to shader. Shader can be either Cg, CGP (Cg preset) or GLSL, GLSLP (GLSL preset)
video_shader = "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/shader/crt-pi.glslp"

# Load video_shader on startup.
# Other shaders can still be loaded later in runtime.
video_shader_enable = "true"

# Defines a directory where shaders (Cg, CGP, GLSL) are kept for easy access.
video_shader_dir = "/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/shader/"

but not both.

To conclude, have a look at this to see the examples as the tread title is probably what you are looking for:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2592/video-smoothing-yay-or-nay/19

obsidianspider

It's interesting to see that someone would think that big pixels would be considered worse video quality. If anything, smoothing makes the picture less accurate. Then again, I'm a fan of the sharp edges.

bidinou

Hehe, this is funny as it is a neverending debate :)

Playing back in the 80s on quite good CRT monitors (RGB/Scart, not composite), pictures used NOT to look blocky nor blurry at all (IMHO). I even checked recently and still think the same :) I had an Atari ST and an Amiga at that time and it was a shock when seeing a PC screen : the same games looked way blockier, ewww !

Nowadays, when using emulators on LCDs, it generally looks extremely blocky or extremely blurry. depending on smoothing being enabled or not. Both hurt my eyes a lot (my eyes are older than they were 20-30 years ago and it really induces eyestrain as far as I'm concerned). The 50/60 Hz CRT probably destroyed my eyes too though...

So using pixel shaders is a HUGE relief for me. But some people dislike them.

What bothers me now is input delay but that's another story.

davej

Below is a selection of snippets from one of the images I use when testing crt-pi to with different settings to give some examples of what can be achieved:

image examples

From left to right they are: no shader smoothing off, no shader smoothing on, crt-pi shader sharper enabled, crt-pi shader default settings. Some people think crt-pi's default settings are too blurry but this image, particularly the gloop at the bottom, demonstrates why I prefer it that way. You can always turn sharper on if you prefer.

As always though, different people have different preferences.

BuZz

@Sathumax If you want to keep your account please use a real permanent email address.

BuZz

Your account has been banned (You signed up with a throw away email address and then subscribed to a category, meaning I receive all the bounced email). If you want it to be unbanned email me buzz [at] exotica.org.uk with a permanent email address.

BuZz

Had to remove your account as it was still sending out notifications.