Tips & Tweaks: Lx3, Lx4, Lx5 modes

[nmalinoski]

Works beautifully in x2 mode, but getting nothing with x3 and x4.

My setup:

Panasonic Fz802 (4k OLED)
PAL 50Hz (SNES, Megadrive, Amiga etc)

x3 and x4 for PAL would mean 1728i and 1152p, which aren’t typical resolutions, even in the PC realm; I would expect support for them to be unrealistic. You’ll probably have to stick to 576p and scale up, or hope you can find a secondary video processor that can understand them.

[Harrumph]

@VinegarJoe

I’ve tried various settings

By various, you mean specifically the PAL x3/x4 tweaks in the OP, or something else?

If you did do the tweaks as listed, probably your display is simply not compatible.
Which is unfortunate, for on a display which can’t force 4:3, only x3 mode provides the proper output.

[VinegarJoe]

By various, you mean specifically the PAL x3/x4 tweaks in the OP, or something else?

Yeah, I’ve tried the settings for x3 and x4 PAL in the OP.

I’ve also tried Marqs’ setting here

Those are for an EZ950 which is a very similar TV. However they’re for NTSC so I doubt they apply here 🙁

The display is showing 313p ~50hz and 1280×288 (x4) or 960×288 (x3).

Thanks for your help anyways, the TV can do 4:3 but it introduces some nasty lag. Better than nothing though!

[VinegarJoe]

I sourced a 60hz Megadrive (262p) and got it working in x3 mode on the Panasonic FZ802 with the following settings:

Generic 4:3
H sample rate 1221
H synclen 88
H back porch 130
H active 960
V synlen 3
V back porch 15
V active 240

Hopefully useful to someone. Most of those were left as default or tweaked slightly to get a better picture, changing the H sample rate to some random number was the key to getting a picture at all.

The benefit to this is that I can play with game mode on because the OSSC sorts out the ratio 🙂

I’ll report back if I get 313p working, but I doubt it.

[Steo]

That’s actually pretty interesting. I had a Panasonic EX700 for a while and I could never get it to work in 3x unless I used V Active 256 then tweaked the other settings to make it look like 1024×768, 1280×768, 1360×768 or 1366×768. My mother has the TV now since I got my LG B7 OLED, but I’ll try test the OSSC on it again with those settings just to see if it does work on other Panasonic models.

[VinegarJoe]

I’m hoping I can get PAL working too, but I’m a bit confused about how what all the different settings do. Is there a beginner’s guide for people like me who have no idea what they’re doing? 😉

The OP seems to suggest that changing the H/V actual will affect the output Res. Is that the case?

[Steo]

Page 1 of this thread has some useful info, but as for custom tweaking, it seems to be a little complicated regarding what a TV will accept. Sometimes it can be easier to use a computer monitor that accepts anything for testing, then try it on the TV when the monitor is reporting the desired resolution.

H Active will affect the horizontal resolution, V Active will affect the vertical one, but H. Samplerate can affect both the width of the picture and the resolution. Basically if you have V Active 240 and you’re using Line3x, you’ll be outputting 720p vertically, it’s usually a combination of messing with the H Active and H Samplerate on fussy TV’s.

A lot of TV’s have PC modes, so increasing V Active to 256 makes the window be 768p, and most TV’s will accept 1024×768, 1280×768, 1360×768 or 1366×768. The problem is that it heavily relies on getting the right combination of H Active and H Samplerate as to whether the TV will display an image. The biggest issue however is that most TV’s only use these PC modes at 60Hz.

There are 2 PAL tweaks on the first page and the one I used for 4x is great if your TV accepts it, but the TV also has to be able to force 4:3 since it shows it as a 16:9 window. There is a 1440×1080 setting that you could try, but a lot of TV’s are too fussy to accept that. My Panasonic was so fussy and I’m surprised you even got a picture in 3x with V Active set to 240.

This is what I had figured out while messing with the Panasonic before regarding NTSC here.

[VinegarJoe]

Thanks for the explanation Steo, appreciate it.

Interestingly I just picked up an NTSC Neo Geo AES and it doesn’t work with the above settings. I had to change it to 256 v.active as per the OP. Your settings in the linked list above also work. The only problem with this is that it seems to result in an incorrect aspect ratio.

I can modify is slight using h.samplerate, but eventually I lose the picture before I can rectify it fully.

The aspect ratio seems roughly correct in x2 mode, but way off in any combination of x3 mode I use.

By changing the h.samplerate away from the default are we always going to be changing the aspect ratio along with it?

[Steo]

H Samplerate always changes the picture width horizontally. If you were to reduce H Active alone then the picture would be stretched offscreen basically.

That’s the only problem with the 1080p 4x setting is that the TV needs to be able to force 4:3. If it can’t then the window is stretched to 16:9. Whatever 3x does it seems to always have a 4:3 window vs other modes.

[VinegarJoe]

Yeah, I can get the Neo Geo working in 3x mode, but I just felt like using the tweaks suggested in the op may be messing with the ratio somewhat? I could be wrong, it just looks like a different ratio to the the 4:3 mode my TV produces in x2 mode and my Mega drive using x3 using the tweaks in my post above.

I am not sure which is ‘correct’ mind, as I don’t have access to a CRT to compare! And I presume this kind of thing can vary from console to console? There’s certainly a lot of overscan area on an AES!

[retroboy87]

Has anyone tested Line5x with PS1 games, on a PS2, and Saturn on an HP Z24N 1920×1200 IPS monitor?
I tried tweaking the sampling settings, as shown on this thread, but I was unable to get Line5x to work on my HP LP2065 1600×1200 S-IPS LCD monitor.

[Harrumph]

Did you try using DVI mode?

[retroboy87]

I always use DVI mode on my HP 1600×1200 LCD monitor, which only has DVI inputs, or else I don’t get any video at all out of the OSSC.
I use HDMI mode on my Asus VG248QE 1920×1080 144Hz TN monitor. Line5x doesn’t work on either of those two LCDs.

I have set the correct Line5x formats, 1600×1200 for the HP and 1920×1080 for the Asus, and saved it to my settings for each monitor.
My only display that works with Line5x is my 19 inch Daewoo LuComs C925DBK VGA CRT monitor.

[retroboy87]

Does anyone here tested a Dell Ultrasharp U2410?

[Steo]

For some reason after updating the firmware, if I use that generic 4:3 tweak for PAL where I sat V Active to 270, there’s big black borders above and below the image now. It’s not an issue for me since I can just use optimal modes, but is there something different about this firmware that it’s doing this? 3x and 4x both have the borders on generic 4:3, and they’re bigger on 3x.

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