A couple of suggestions for some shaders

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

Well… I played various games and I am thinking to myself “I wish I can make a 16 or 32 bit game look like it’s off of a nes or Master System/Game Gear or something like that” or “I wish I can make 8 bit games look like something off of a Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16 or even Neo Geo or even Playstation!”

I’m sorry if I sound like I am Requesting some Shaders but I would like to learn how to make a 8 bit game look 16 bits or even 32 bits, and I would like to know how to make 16 and 32 bit games look 8-bit. I would like the shader files made and I would like to learn how to make the various shaders with the pallets and the shades from the various game systems. And you ever heard of the saying “Give a man fish and he would eat for a day, Teach a man to Fish then he will eat for a lifetime.” Well I would like to learn how to remake and demake pallets and systems.

I hope it’s not too much to ask…

#2

Shaders are not magic (they seem magic at times). You can’t add additional detail or anything with them. I guess it could be possible to add better shading to 8 bit sprites with shaders, doing subtle gradients or something like that but other that that I don’t think you’ll have any luck getting 16 bit looks from 8 bit games.

The opposite might be feasible, there is already the dilation shader that makes everything flatter…

#3

There is a shader for DOSBox that is supposed to make even VGA games look like EGA games, with their more limited palette of mostly primary colors. That’s the only thing that comes to mind that is along these lines.

#4

I guess one could implement a shader which maps every pixel to it’s nearest color in a given pallette. this way you could recolor the image so that it mimics the NES for example. yeah the other way around though is not possible.

#5

Gradients per pixel might be interesting actually.

#6

I don’t really know how you implement custom color palettes as a shader, but I wrote one which tries to emulate the gameboy look. It just caculates the luma of every pixel and maps it to one of 4 greyscales. and there you go, gameboy-look:

http://pastebin.com/5hg9P8Du