For those who struggle to get retroarch to crt

Hello folks,

Even tho I got crt emudriver to work from an old ATI card, I found it to be not reliable to work consistently, with this method it works a bit more consistently for me, however you lose the support for modern pixel art games outside retroarch.

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Retroarch is very finicky when it comes to CRT output with custom resolutions. Eg on Linux Mint I use a VGA CRT and Switchres activates only on 1.19. Any version after that shows a black screen and I have to exit. This on Appimage version. Unfortunately in Flathub version, Switchres is not activated at all, but at least application accepts external custom resolutions in monitor settings (640x240 etc).

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I wonder if we’ll get a magical solution to this one day. Something that makes it plug n play.

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can’t comment on Linux , but this works like a charm on windows with the latest nightly

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compared to the headache I got from “crt emudriver” , this is really easy, you just need 2 devices that would cost you less than 20 usd from aliexpress, provided that you have nvidia gpu.

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I think I might give your guide a try because, like you, crt emudriver made me give up, and I prefer hardware solutions.

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should work easily, post here any issue you might encounter, btw, any game that can be strached in 2560x240p in borderless fullscreen (look at the photo with sonic 2 title screen, notice how it looks on lcd) would also display correctly on crt , I manged to get the fan game streets of rage remake 5.2 (highly recommended!) and even some mugen games to display correctly on crt.

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Raspberry Pi 2W costs pennies, it can do Composite out on Lakka with a small hack (solder 2 composite wires) and will play anything up to PS1 at 100% speed. You need a USB sound card too. Total cost like 25 usd. No need nvidias, a chain of converters that might or might not work and a whole PC to do it.

it’s certainly is an option , for me tho, the posted above works great.

It’s here, image is pretty good over composite too. Pi 2W is a Pi 3 with less memory in reality.

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I prefer CRU on Windows (should work with any GPU vendor). I also usually set scaling to “Custom”, I forgot what the deal with “Full” was. But then, I also like to tinker with various modelines for refresh rate adjustment etc.

For modern pixel art games, you might be able to utilize some tools like magpie (can stretch res on x-y axis).

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oh that’s interesting about magpie , would have to test that after I get back from work tomorrow , thanks

btw are consumer crt tvs locked to 50 and 60 hz respectively for pal and ntsc or can they play specific arcade resolutions above 15 kHz range, eg Mortal Kombat, Dragon Ninja, Sega Model 3, R-Type that run around 54-57 hz?

this is the great advantage of Switchres really, without the need to set manual resolutions for each and every game

That should depend on the TV, both of mine can handle arcade refresh rates and resolutions (not Model 3 - it’s 24 kHz). However, there seems to be still some PAL/NTSC detection going on. This is very obvious on my Telefunken TV, as it’s colors change significantly even with RGB. E.g. 56 Hz upwards is detected as a NTSC mode. Unless something explicitly sends PAL60 (Wii).

My AEG TV can go a little over 16 kHz and under 15, but I don’t assume that is a good thing for the chassis.

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