Just submitted pull request to GitHub–should appear shortly ( 
) when updating the shaders in RA!
These make everything else I’ve done look like dogsh*t.
Base is an ultra high quality Lanczos upscaler with anti-ringing built in (merge of 2 existing shaders with a minor fix). Virtually zero halos/ringing. Next, applied a custom mild unsharp mask filter to remove any excess blur, then finished with a custom, integer-aligned mask/lines effect.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR BEST GRAPHICS:
Go to RA Settings --> Video --> Scaling --> Set integer scaling to ON, Integer scale axis Y + X, Integer scale scaling set to UNDERSCALE, aspect ratio to core provided, IMPORTANT: set crop overscan to OFF (otherwise you’ll be double cropping between RA and the core and you will get a blurrier image that’s the same size), Finally: go to your core to properly set aspect ratio and cropping settings (eg, for bsnes it should be 1:1 and crop set to 8 lines; for Swanstation it should be set to either “1:1” (for Symphony of the Night) or “Corrected (NTSC)” (for Valkyrie Profile) and crop to “only overscan area”).
–“SharpSmooth” is for 2d pixel art.
–“Arcade” is best/intended for games with pre-rendered graphics (eg, Final Fantasy 7-9, Valkyrie Profile, etc).
Some screens (NOTE: due to the nature of these masks, it’s basically impossible to show them at full brightness and without banding/moire artifacts, but they will look ~4x BRIGHTER and ~10x CLEARER in RA; in the meantime, you can download them and I can confirm they present correctly within the Windows Photos app after clicking to view at 100% size):
Development aside: I tried virtually all named Windowed Sinc filters and Lanczos is simply the best. Blackman and Bohman were runner ups, but Lanczos wears the crown (at least once the AR filter is applied).
