My experience setting up Launchbox and Emulators with my CRT TV

[Abwezi]

Over the last couple weeks I've been chipping away at setting up my ROM collection with Launchbox and my CRT TV

http://imgur.com/CraS2GE

The picture I've linked above is the result I shared on Reddit when Lordmonkus replied and stated there might be an interest here in how I pulled this all off and I'd be happy to spread whatever knowledge I can to help people achieve the same thing. The first thing required in setting this up is just getting a modern PC to output 15khz into a CRT in the first place, the way I'm able to do this is using an old AMD Radeon HD 7850 GPU with modified drivers called CRT_Emudriver, more information on that here: http://geedorah.com/eiusdemmodi/forum/viewtopic.php?id=295 then after my computer is now able to send 15khz I take the signal through a custom VGA-SCART cable I found on Ebay, from there I use a common SCART to Component trans-coder easily found on either Amazon or Ebay and an aux to RCA L/R audio cord to send a component signal to my CRT. There is a lot of good extra information about other methods and equipment that can help you bring a signal from your PC to a CRT TV or PVM/BVM here in this thread I've also participated in: https://www.aussiearcade.com/showthread.php/87668-A-guide-to-connecting-your-Windows-PC-to-an-SD-CRT-TV-PVM-or-Arcade-Monitor . That covers how I output to my CRT but now onto how I configure my emulators to work with this.

Now on to the Emulator setup, for most systems I use Retroarch. CRT_Emudriver allows you to assign any custom resolutions you want that the TV can support so I have set up several resolutions for my different consoles for the GBA, GB, and SMS they mostly use one resolution but for SNES, NES, Genesis\CD\32X, etc switch between 240 and 224 so I have a profile set up for both. How I do this is I make seperate emulator listings for different profiles in example, Retroarch_GBA.cfg, Retroarch_TV.cfg, Retroarch_224p.cfg etc for each different console / display / vertical resolution I want to choose and point my command line to load them accordingly depending on which "launch with" option I choose. The CFG's for the CRT just define which screen index the CRT is, the resolution to switch too (so no borderless fullscreen here) and the aspect ratio matching the same resolution ex. 2560x240, same with the profile for my big screen TV but it's set to auto fullscreen to whatever that screen is set to.

I use Project 64 and EPSXe for just a few games on both platforms as well Dolphin and Mame primarily for GC and Arcade so for those I use two tools. Multi Monitor Tool: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/multi_monitor_tool.html I use this too switch the primary monitor for emulators so they can full screen on the CRT, and then to change it back as well when the game is close using the additional applications feature. I also use ChangeScreenResolution.exe: http://tools.taubenkorb.at/change-screen-resolution/ to change the resolution on the CRT. I make batch files for these tools that tell them which screen to make primary or change to what resolution, then on a per game basis I assign them as additional apps for certain games. Dolphin just auto fullscreens to whatever monitor it was on last on so I have a separate Dolphin executable for games I play on the CRT like virtual console titles. Groovymame is made for CRT TVs in mind and doesn't really require much additional setup.

Anyways that's how I set up my CRT to work into my Launchbox setup, feel free to ask any questions and hopefully someone finds this interesting / useful

[neil9000]

Thank you so much @Abwezi

This is a very thorough write up and will be very helpful to many of our users.The post is very much appreciated.  

[Abwezi]

Thanks happy to help!

[Trnzaddict]

So super resolutions like 2560x240 work even on Sdtv's?

 

Hey it's funny you posted this. I'm honestly thinking of moving my entire emulation set up from my plasma to a free 27 inch crt I got with component inputs. No more fiddling with filters, input lag, etc.  I already have crt emudriver installed but I need a transcoder which I'll be ordering after reading the article on Aussie arcade to get a picture out of the crt.

[Abwezi]

Yeah CRT's are pretty limited with vertical resolution but can actually resolve a really wide range of horizontal resolutions most go even higher than 2560 I actually have a 3840x240 mode installed as well because using that I can have too different sets of porch values to adjust overscan on certain games.

I hope everything works well for you let me know how it goes. I'd say why not keep the profiles for the plasma around too though? What I love about Launchbox is it makes it easy to pick between screens on a whim, I still quite like how retroarch looks on my tv with a nice shader / overlay, one thing I can say is nothing can beat CRT color though