Can't change overscan

[Dendonflo]

Hi, first post on this forum, I hope this is the right place, I've been using Recalbox for a while on an LCD screen and recently got an old CRT TV for free that I wanted to use when playing some old games.

I bought a cheap adapter converting VGA -> Composite to plug my laptop on the TV and it worked without too mush hassle.

The problem now is that the adapter I bought is kind of terrible, I can live with the pretty bad image quality until I can get another (better) one, but the picture is also cropped pretty hard, I don't know if it comes from the adapter or my TV, but it's there.

The TV I use doesn't have any options in the menu to reposition the image on screen, so I wanted to configure the overscan directly from Recalbox, and I found several tutorials detailing the process, but all these tutorials tell me to edit the config.txt file in the /boot folder.

So I connected to my machine via SSH, mounted the /boot drive as RW and tried using nano to modify the file. Except it doesn't exist, and nano just creates a new one.

I tried just adding the overscan configuration lines to the new file and rebooting but it doesn't appear to work. Overscan is activated in the Advanced Options menu, and I also tried the "overscan_scale=1" trick described in the documentation.

I could live with a little bit of overscan but it's severe enough that it hides info in some games, I can't see my money when playing Final Fantasy VIII.

Recalbox was installed on an external drive using the RaspBerry Pi Imager (I basically followed the instruction on the download page of Recalbox)

I tried doing some research on this problem but everywhere I look, it seems people have no trouble finding the config.txt file which I can't find no matter where I look.

[Dendonflo]

Ok this is weird. I updated Recalbox to the latest version that just came out, and the overscan options still doesn't work (I also tried putting the lines in recalbox.conf in the /SHARE/system folder), as I can put really big overscan values and see no difference.

But now, though the main Recalbox menu still looks the same, I can see my gils in FF VIII !

I though the option only worked in games, and just didn't affect the main menu but no, changing the values in any of the config files doesn't change a thing even in game, it's just nicely configured by default now (only in game, but the overscan on the main menu doesn't bother me).

I'd still like to be able to change these values a little bit, so my problem isn't entirely fixed, but I guess the situation is now much better

[Zing]

@Dendonflo

cheap adapter converting VGA -> Composite

Signal converters are not always perfect, cheap or expensive, they may not work as intended.

See if the documentation helps you:
https://recalbox.gitbook.io/documentation/tutorials/video/display-configuration

[Dendonflo]

@Zing

Yeah I already checked the documentation, everything is configured except for the overscan, it's where it tells me to edit the config.txt which I don't have.

I found out this file is apparently only for Raspberry Pi installs of RecalBox, I'm just using an old pc so this is probably why it's not in the drive. I don't know if it's possible on a PC or if it's specific to Raspberry drivers or something.

The TV I use is also kind of busted, AV sources are (apparently) fine but if you try to display an analog TV channel the "no signal" blue screen jitters everywhere as if you were driving a magnet across the screen, so it could also be this ^^"

I'm gonna use another TV soon but first I need to repair it's power cable, so I guess this will tell me if the problem comes from the adapter or the TV (but seeing the picture quality, I'm pretty sure the adapter is tha cause here). ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[Zing]

@dendonflo said in Can't change overscan:

Yeah I already checked the documentation, everything is configured except for the overscan, it's where it tells me to edit the config.txt which I don't have.

Yes, you are right about that.

he TV I use is also kind of busted, AV sources are (apparently) fine but if you try to display an analog TV channel the "no signal" blue screen jitters everywhere as if you were driving a magnet across the screen, so it could also be this ^^"
I'm gonna use another TV soon but first I need to repair it's power cable, so I guess this will tell me if the problem comes from the adapter or the TV (but seeing the picture quality, I'm pretty sure the adapter is tha cause here). ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Well... sorry, but I really don't know how to help you then....