ES-DE and CRT w/ RetroArch

Posting in off-topic 'cause I’m not sure this is a RetroArch problem I’m running into. I have Launchbox/BigBox setup with RetroArch, and I have my CRT finally working properly with it.

I primarily use this build with Emulation Station - Desktop Edition (ES-DE) however. After trying every angle I can think of with tweaking settings, opening, closing RetroArch and games in different ways… it looks like everything works, until I tell ES-DE to run a game.

It kicks in, the CRT changes resolution, but the sizing is wrong. SPECIFICALLY, it’s ignoring the switchres.ini settings and acting like I don’t have that in the RetroArch working folder.

Again if I load up RA directly, or launch via BigBox it uses the settings in my switchres.ini and works. Just, not if I do the same from ES-DE.

Wasn’t sure if anyone around here had maybe seen this issue before. I’m trying to find their support items, but in the meantime, thought I’d throw this out there.

Just an idea: could it be that ES-DE has its own settings that it’s feeding over RetroArch’s? Normally, EmulationStation does this, so you can configure everything outside of RetroArch, and the desired settings would be passed to it when a game is loaded. However, RetroArch has many, many variables, so it’s possible that your ES-DE isn’t taking care of them all and feeding some blank values, overwriting whatever you have set.

I would make sure there’s a proper setting inside ES-DE for CRT configuration and use it. If there’s not, I’d ask in their official support how the frontend handles the situation: does it leave everything to RetroArch or loads blank values for variables not yet supported? Finally, there may be some permission problem, like not having read access to the location where your configuration is saved.

That’s kind of what I was thinking, that ES-DE was overriding some setting. I can’t figure out how it’s even launching the software though. I took a look at the documentation for ES-DE and haven’t found any info on that yet. Unfortunately it doesn’t have it’s own setting for CRT use, but it does run fine at 640x480 which is the desktop resolution I’m pushing in that use-case.

I went onto their discord, but my message was completely ignored in their community section.

Permissions should be set ok, but I will double check it’s not getting in the way somewhere.

Check inside the ES-DE directory and see if there are any configuration files there which may be used as defaults. Those undocumented issues always need quite a bit of scrutiny.

Also, Discord is not a very good tool, specially for support. If they have any other official channel, try that.

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