Aspect ratio ...

[Bolthouse]

Hey Everyone,

I just ordered my first Raspberry Pi and am going to build myself a desktop arcade using RetroPie.

I'm in the process of sourcing all the needed components and I've got a question about aspect ratio. I live in Hong Kong and I can find tons of used LDC monitors, but they're all either 16:9 or 5:4 (1280 x 1024).

As almost all classic games use a 4:3 ratio, I really want to maintain that in my desktop cabinet.

My plan was to use the 5:4 monitor, but build the cabinet with a bezel that would physically crop the image area to 4:3. Then, through the monitors adjustments or through the emulators, adjust the image output to fit the bezel.

I just fiddled with this on the Windows version of MAME, and it seems totally possible (Windows MAME provides more than enough control). But because the Pi version of MAME is slightly different, I'm not sure if it affords the same level of control?

Once I get my Pi (hopefully in a few days), I'll load up RetroPie and see what it's capable of. But the Pi is new to me, so I'm curious if others have encountered this issue and what your solution was?

Thanks,

George

[dankcushions]

there are a number of mame emulators available on retropie, but certainly any of the lr- (libretro) prefixed ones will handle any aspect ratio you want to use. in fact, you shouldn't need to change anything in most cases, as they will naturally try and display in the correct native aspect ratio (which, as you say, is normally 4:3).

so yeah, you should be fine :)

[caver01]

@Bolthouse I use a 1280x1024 LCD in my cabinet and I think it works great. 4:3 would be 1280x960 with letterbox bands 32 pixels high on the top and bottom. You might try some of the libretro emulators to see how games look full-screen vs. 4:3. I like the barrel-curve shader with scanlines, so I want every pixel available. This would be 5:4, but I honestly, with the curvature I don't notice the difference.

Another consideration is this: If you will be playing any vertical games on the screen mounted horizontally, you might want to take advantage of all of the pixels you can--something that a physical bezel would prevent. You'd be limited to 720x960, when you could get 768x1024. Just a thought.