ChessPawn
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2013 9:45 pm

Making The Screen Big

Fri Jan 11, 2013 10:18 pm

Hi guys,

Pretty excited to get my new Pi! Anyways, I'm setting it up right now, and I'm trying to have it so that it is easily viewable from a distance. In 1920x1080, the text is not even readable from where I am trying to see it from. So in this situation, how would I go about making the text and picture as big as possible, while still being reasonably easy to navigate and such? Would I pick the smallest resolution my TV supports, 480p, I think?

EDIT: Making both the console and the GUI bigger would help

Mobius
Posts: 238
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2012 1:07 am
Location: San Angelo, Texas USA

Re: Making The Screen Big

Sat Jan 12, 2013 1:36 am

Are you using composite output or HDMI? I know you can set the resolution for the HDMI in /boot/config.txt. To force HDMI on and set to 640x480 just uncomment the line that says "hdmi_safe=1".

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mahjongg
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Posts: 13092
Joined: Sun Mar 11, 2012 12:19 am
Location: South Holland, The Netherlands

Re: Making The Screen Big

Sat Jan 12, 2013 1:42 am

Try using a resolution that is half or even a quarter of your monitors native resolution for best effect, with the least unwanted artifacts.

ChessPawn
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2013 9:45 pm

Re: Making The Screen Big

Sat Jan 12, 2013 1:44 am

I'm using HDMI, and so when I changed hdmi_mode to 1 (VGA, which I guess is 640x480), it just made a small rectangle in the middle of my TV, with the GUI contained in there. So, that made the situation even worse. I'm going to say that I don't care much for HD at this point, just text and pictures easily viewable from a distance.

EDIT: So if my TV is 1080p, use something like 480p? I tried that and it's pretty close, but some stuff is still going off the screen, even with overscan adjusted to have borders. Also, is it my setup that's causing the "start menu" to hide the bottoms of app windows?

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