Pi in the Sky...

Scanlines

You can just use Floobs tool, which is the easy way, but here's what it's doing in the background if you fancy doing it the manual way just so your understand things.

1) When in-game, press select + x (whatever you assign select and x to in your initial controller setup...it might not be a button labelled as x on the joypad!). This opens the RGUI menu.
2) Scroll down to Online Updater, and confirm that selection (button R on my controller)
3) Then scroll down to Update GLSL Shaders, and again confirm that.
4) This downloads/updates the shader files.
5) Then exit the game, and go into the Retropie Menu from the start screen.
6) Select Configuration Editor from the menu
7) Select Configure Basic Libretro Emulator Options
8) Select either Configure All, or choose the individual emulator you want to configure. In this case I've chosen FBA (as it's way better than Mame on the Pi I find).
9) Set Video Smoothing to 'False' (seems to be the general consensus, though it's down to individual preference on what you think looks best reall).
10) Set Video Shader Enable to True
11) Choose the specific shader file you like, in this case I think crt-pie-curvature-vertical looks the best on my current tv
12) With all those options set, exit back to the main menu by 'cancelling' your way back out.
13) Start up the game, and it will load your chosen shader file.
14) To browse through the rest of them, press and hold Select on your controller, and use 'm' and 'n' on a keyboard to flick between the different shader files.
15) If you find you like a different one & wish that to be the default one, simply choose that one for step 11 above.

My tv is a 720p/1080i set (ancient plasma), so I think that's skewing up the scanlines for me slightly. Even at though, they make the games look way better than the raw image you'll see without them (think pixelated mess). Some/certain games don't play nice with certain shaders though...the one I chose above looks very well for arcade games...but for something like Sonic 1, it looks awful when the screen is moving. You need to play around and find the best one for each case I think.

Andrew76 wrote: »

Nice one thanks. That looks decent enough.

I watched some of that Video Manager App video above (will go back and watch it all when I get all the gear) and it looks good. Does it also change the aspect ratio to 4:3 when he's displaying that retro tv border? 4:3 would look best rather than it getting stretched full screen?

Afaik the emulators handle the aspect ratio, and any overlay (the old style tv) he puts in merely fills the black bars at the sides of a 4:3 image on a 16:9 panel. I haven't messed around with overlays yet, the scanlines I showed above are shaders. When I get a new tv I'll look into setting up the handhelds with overlays, so the gameboy roms play on the image of a gameboy on screen etc - handheld roms on a large panel look horrendous.

Where are my scraped images and metadata saved?

Once your games have been scraped they will be located in two parts: Downloaded Images and Gamelists

/home/pi/.emulationstation/downloaded_images
or
/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images

and

/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists
or
/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/scraper

^^ for existing scraped metadata that you want to delete

So once you delete the images from /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/downloaded_images and gamelists.xml files from /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelists - make sure you press the start button, go to other settings, and turn "save metadata on exit" to OFF. Then reboot. If you don't do this, the old metadata will just be re-written to a newly generated xml file. Once you've rebooted, turn "save metadata on exit" back to ON.

Side note, metadata greatly slows down the shutdown/restart procedures. When you have everything scraped, & have everything the way you like it, I'd suggest leaving "save metadata on exit" at OFF, to improve the shutdown/restart times.

It could be a bug Andrew, have a look here - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/82/overscan-issue

It seems the overscan=1 is commented out (there's a # before the line in the config file, which sets that line as a line to be ignored). You might have to manually edit it like the user did down near the end of that link

Andrew76 wrote: »

I had edited the config.txt to turn off overscan (disable_overscan=1) but that made no difference. I got too impatient and formatted the micro SD and have started again. :pac:

Cheers for the link though.

Did that a few times myself tbh.

As an aside - is it possible to edit the config.txt while the Pi is running? Using nano or something? I turned off the pi, popped the sd card back in the pc and edited the file that way but that's awful time consuming.

Yup, sudo nano *filename should open the file for editing, just be sure to ctrl-o, enter, ctrl-x to save & exit...then sudo reboot for the changes to take effect

Andrew76 wrote: »

I had a read of that scrapper link you posted above and noticed this note:

Seeing as it worked for you I'm assuming that the Pidrive isn't classed as external - probably because of all that mounting lark you went through?

It's because I symlinked the roms folder on the sd card, to the roms folder on the hdd drive (so when you ftp into the Pi, and double click into the roms folder, it automatically brings you to the hdd - so the system doesn't know any different). If you don't do it this way, you've to edit paths etc for each individual emulator, and it's way messier. Symlinking is the perfect solution

Have you gotten to play anything yet even as a test - runs good on the pi3?

Played and tested a good few systems yeah, everything from Atari 2600 right up to CPS3 stuff...everything has run perfectly for me so far

There's a thing you can buy called a power block, that sits on the GPIO pins & allows you to wire up an on/off switch. I doubt there'd be room for it though in the 6x6 enclosure, I'm not too sure really.

I think The Last Bandit wired up some kind of gubbin to power his Pi-powered Retron 5 too...so he might know more on the topic