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  • RetroPie + CRT

    From deepthaw@80:774/43 to All on Tue Oct 10 08:59:28 2017
    Settling into my new house, I've decided on the attic as my "getaway"
    location, since nobody else goes up there. I put an old 19" TV up there and decided to hook up my RetroPie.

    A recent-ish update enabled 240p output over composite video,and I decided to give it a shot.

    It looks really nice in most situations. Genesis games look great, being that they run at 320x224, SNES games look nice as well, but the graphics are kind
    of "squashed" since they run at 256x224.

    Some technical details behind this: 240p is running at 320x240 resolution,
    and you have to play with aspect ratios and so on to force a 1:1 display of pixels (interpolation/smoothing looks awful to me at this low a resolution.)

    On native hardware, it could tell the display to run at the intended
    resolution natively, so the SNES had wider pixels than the Genesis to make up for having a lower horizontal resolution. Since the closest you can get with composite is 320x240, you're going to end up with black bars on the sides.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A35 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Deep Space '94 * telnet://deepspace94.com * fnord (80:774/43)
  • From bcw142@80:603/0.3 to deepthaw on Tue Oct 10 13:07:29 2017
    On 10/10/17, deepthaw said the following...

    Settling into my new house, I've decided on the attic as my "getaway" location, since nobody else goes up there. I put an old 19" TV up there and decided to hook up my RetroPie.

    May not be the best place, Pi's generally don't have heatsinks and don't
    like the high temperature that an attic can get to (120+F) not to mention people ;) Depends on time of year of course.

    A recent-ish update enabled 240p output over composite video,and I
    decided to give it a shot.

    It looks really nice in most situations. Genesis games look great, being that they run at 320x224, SNES games look nice as well, but the graphics are kind of "squashed" since they run at 256x224.

    That should be good for the old DOOM, DOOM2 and such. Should work OK under Retropie's DOSBox setup (I've run it that way). Older Pis have their own version of DOOM setup for the video chip and such so it will work full speed. The Pi3 seems OK on that stuff without that custom setup. Freedoom is one of the versions and it will run the old DOOM files as well and the Freedoom versions. Even Quake started out at 320x240 originally, DOOM2 & Quake had higher res. modes (640x480, 800x600). I found the composite to limiting and hard to keep running after updates and things, went to HDMI and newer LCDs.
    I Did use old composite stuff for a while (a year or so) on some stuff before the PiB+ and Pi2 (and Retropi).

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A35 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Workpoint - You can't get here from there (80:603/0.3)
  • From deepthaw@80:774/43 to bcw142 on Tue Oct 10 13:42:04 2017
    May not be the best place, Pi's generally don't have heatsinks and don't like the high temperature that an attic can get to (120+F) not to mention people ;) Depends on time of year of course.

    It's actually been partially converted into a third bedroom, so we have AC
    and stuff like that - it does tend to be a little warmer than the rest of the house, but not near the extremes of a typical attic.

    800x600). I found the composite to limiting and hard to keep running
    after updates and things, went to HDMI and newer LCDs. I Did use old composite stuff for a while (a year or so) on some stuff before the PiB+ and Pi2 (and Retropi).

    I don't know hard it'll be to keep it running long term, but it does have the immediate side-effect of letting my turn off the CRT-PI shader I was using -
    it was adding enough CPU overhead that my Pi was flashing up the overheat
    icon on a fairly regular basis.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A35 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Deep Space '94 * telnet://deepspace94.com * fnord (80:774/43)
  • From bcw142@80:603/0.3 to deepthaw on Wed Oct 11 08:47:06 2017
    On 10/10/17, deepthaw said the following...
    I don't know hard it'll be to keep it running long term, but it does
    have the immediate side-effect of letting my turn off the CRT-PI shader
    I was using - it was adding enough CPU overhead that my Pi was flashing
    up the overheat icon on a fairly regular basis.

    There are a number of Pi heatsink kits that can help with that: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6705VF5283&ignorebbr=1&nm_ mc=KNC-GoogleMKP-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleMKP-PC-_-pla-_-Accessories+-+General-_-9SI A6705VF5283

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A35 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Workpoint - You can't get here from there (80:603/0.3)