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Retropi/EmulationStation on CGA arcade monitor

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:06 am
by RobbyIRL5
Hi all, I just got my ArPiCade installed recently, and it is super cool, very happy with it. I have tinkered with RetroPi systems for some time now and my initial thought was that I'd be able to take one of the SD chip images that I already have, plug it in, and play. I believe there are two issues I'll have to address (as I did that and it didn't immediately work):
-The video when EmulationStation loaded was unreadable, it was out of sync, likely wrong resolution.
-The joystick driver.

Hoping somebody can point me to the right place before I dive into the Linux HowTo search mode, which takes some time! It may be that EmulationStation is only hi-res and won't work and if that's the answer, all good!

Thank you,

Robby

Re: Retropi/EmulationStation on CGA arcade monitor

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2019 12:17 pm
by dee2eR
You'll need to change the resolution to something low res in /boot/config.txt. The easiest way is to just use 480i but the games won't look quite the same as original when interlaced as most ran non interlaced at around 240 lines (actually varies a bit from game to game with arcade stuff). You could try one of the Pis 240p modes but some software isn't designed for low res and can get a bit weird. At 480i the default 480p configs will be close enough to not run into such issues (if they still exist, I haven't played with RetroPie in years now, 2.5 years ago Emulation Station only liked 480i).

The GPIO joystick driver mk_arcade_joystick can be used for the JAMMA controls. Pretty sure it can be installed from the RetroPie installer script.

There's also the already modified for RaspberryJAMMA version of Recalbox by Ouaibe here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=541 while not RetroPie it also uses the Emulation Station frontend.

Re: Retropi/EmulationStation on CGA arcade monitor

Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2019 8:22 pm
by RobbyIRL5
Thank you!