I’m running the latest version of Retropie and Retroarch on my Raspberry Pi 3B+. I don’t have anything overclocked. The problem I’m having is I’m getting flicker when Black Frame Insertion is enabled at 1920x240 120Hz. The only system that flickers is SNES. I don’t get any flicker with NES, Sega Genesis and Sega CD. All games are NTSC 60Hz. This is a fresh install. I thought by doing a new fresh install of Retropie that It would fix the issue but noo, instead I wasted my time. SNES games still flicker with black frame insertion enabled even though I’m getting 60 FPS. I wasted my time doing a fresh install. This flicker isn’t even a constant flicker like with black frame insertion @ 60Hz. I’m getting flicker and I’m not supposed too. When the flicker happens my FPS will drop from 60 to 59 and 59.7. Black frame insertion was designed too be enabled at 120Hz yet I’m getting random flicker. My settings are default as shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p96niCoWcd4. This seems like a very odd bug that only SNES games randomly flicker. I wish I can show a video of the flicker but it won’t show up on camera.
Try one of the faster SNES cores.
Which core would be considered the fastest? I’m running lr-snes9x-2010 as my core. According to the RetroPie github page “If you have a Pi 2, the preference is lr-snes9x2010 due to better speed and sound emulation” it seems like if this was the case it should be running even better on my Pi 3 B+ and I shouldn’t be having any problems at all.
The older the year stamp in the name, the faster it should be at the cost of some accuracy.
Bump
Is there anything like a guide to using black frame insertion? I’ve been able to make this work with no issues before, but I’m trying to set up a new system and now I’m getting some random flicker. Not the flicker you’d expect; it almost looks like dropped frames. It’s not specific to any particular core(s), either. What are the relevant settings I should check/tweak?
I’m running the monitor at 144Hz and set RA to 120Hz. Seems to do the same thing if I set the monitor to 120Hz. I thought 144Hz might be better because the actual refresh rate reported by the graphics card is 119.something when I select 120Hz. Didn’t seem to make a difference, though.
When I had a monitor that could support it, I always had to run the monitor at 120 Hz. Also, make sure you have dynamic rate control enabled and aren’t using the “sync to exact content framerate” option.
I tried “sync to exact content framerate” but even still I get random flickering in certain games even though they are NTSC 60FPS games. I’m going to try downloading Recalbox and see if the flickering still happens.
Yes, you’ll definitely get flicker with that option. To avoid flicker, it needs to sync to your monitor, not to your content. NTSC isn’t exactly 60 fps and SNES is something like 60.01.
Try disabling audio sync.
Sorry, I misinterpreted aren’t as are, guess I didn’t read that sentence thoroughly enough. Anyways, I tried turning off Audio Sync and I still get flickering. However, I don’t see dynamic rate control in Retroarch settings, where would that be at?
it’s not exposed directly, so it’s probably working as intended.
Something else to check: make sure you use exclusive (i.e., not windowed) full-screen.
I made sure these settings were enabled yet I still get the random flickering.
video_windowed_fullscreen = “false”
video_fullscreen = “true”
Dunno what to tell you, then. Could be something external like a GPU driver utility monkeying with sync /shrug
Well it seems like my problem is solved. I downloaded Recalbox instead of Retropie. I tested a badly flickering game “Super Mario World 2 Yoshi’s Island” it would flicker badly at the title screen. With Recalbox the flickering is gone. It seems to me that Recalbox is more optimized than RetroPie.