As an important reason why I play on RecalBoxed Pi with the great RecalBox RGB Dual add-on, is because it can handle RetroAchievements and CRT display (and as such, is superior to a MisterFPGA solution - hey, just pushing a joke here ðŸ¤), I've been quite bothered about how unreadable the RetroArch notifications are with this setup (all hyper stretched vertically, due to the specific resolution ratio used by the add-on, in coordination with the way RetroArch handles notifications display).
So I played with the various RetroArch settings on messages/notifications and found a solution.
It's an inferior one compared to the nice RetroAchievements widget, but at least it's a readable one.
It mainly involves switching back to classic text only notifications (which are also static, not scrolling).
Here is the result I got with my configuration:
To get this, I created a .retroarch.cfg
RetroArch configuration file in /recalbox/share/
directory (that's \\RECALBOX\share\
when accessing using samba share),
with the following content :
menu_enable_widgets = "false"
video_message_color = "ffff20"
video_msg_bgcolor_enable = "true"
video_msg_bgcolor_red = "10"
video_msg_bgcolor_green = "10"
video_msg_bgcolor_blue = "70"
video_msg_bgcolor_opacity = "0.5"
video_font_path = "/recalbox/share/fonts/VIENNAHY.TTF"
video_font_size = "25"
video_message_pos_x = "0.04"
video_message_pos_y = "0.06"
While editing this file, If like me you also got problems with RetroAchievements "hardcore" mode not activating on some cores (like PlayStation), despite having it configured as such on RecalBox configuration menu, you can also add this entry (anywhere in the same configuration file) that will force "hardcore" mode (the RecalBox mode setting from the configuration menu is then bypassed, please note that) :
cheevos_hardcore_mode_enable = "true"
Notice that a specific font is being used on the video_font_path
parameter, not provided with RetroArch or RecalBox, but key to get readable notifications.
It's this font : https://www.1001fonts.com/gf-vienna-heavy-font.html
So you need to download the font here, getting a gf-vienna-heavy.zip
file.
Then unzip that file and copy the VIENNAHY.TTF
font file in a new directory on your Pi: /recalbox/share/fonts/
(so create a new fonts
directory in /recalbox/share/
and copy that file in it).
As you can see on its webpage preview, that this font is quite stretched horizontally, so... it compensates the vertical stretch induced by the RGB Dual resolution.
And that's about it.
You can change the message colors if you don't like those I used. Just experiment with the various color parameters in the configuration file, background opacity, etc.
Also you can see that the message background isn't exactly behind the message text, but nothing can be done on that, it's like that with any font, even the default RetroArch one.