Adamanttron HDR CRT Shader

Adamanttron is a fork of Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor v2.6.1 (2026.01.21) by MajorPainTheCactus.

Changes in Megatron v2.6.5+ have, as far as have been able to test, radically reduced color accuracy on at least my WOLED display, with the tradeoff of also making the simulated phosphor patterns less similar to those seen on real CRTs.

As a result, i have continued using and modifying v2.6.1 for the last 6 months, and i have decided it is time to officially fork.

Unless otherwise labeled, all included presets were made on made on my LG C1, targeting ~800 nit WOLEDs.

So far, i have made the following modifications and improvements:

Downsample Pseudo Hi-Res compatibility

As i understand it, 15KHz CRT displays would treat double-horizontal resolution modes (512x224, 640x240, etc) as tho they were not doubled, resulting in a blending effect, called pseudo hi-res. A number of SFC/SNES games are known to have used this behavior for transparency effects, including Breath of Fire II, Jurassic Park, and Kirby’s Dream Land 3, and as far as i know it is the correct behavior for any device originally meant to be displayed on a 15KHz CRT TV/monitor.

This setting has been built to integrate seamlessly with the setting of the same name in decoupled-guest-advanced-ntsc and decoupled-guest-advanced-pal.

  • 1 = off

  • 2 = Triggers the blending effect whenever the horizontal resolution is more than twice the vertical resolution. This works well with cores that either always output a pseudo hi-res image for compatibility (such as bsnes-jg), or cores that only use pseudo hi-res for pseudo hi-res content (such as SwanStation). True high-resolution/interlaced content is not effected.

  • 3 = Triggers the blending effect whenever the horizontal resolution is 480 or higher. This is needed for cores that display pseudo hi-res content in a true high-resolution container (such as Mesen-S and a number of bsnes variants). Unfortunately, this halves the resolution of true high-resolution/interlaced content, as there is no way to differentiate pseudo hi-res and true high-resolution/interlaced content in these cores.

HDR: Content Color Gamut

This setting allows you to change the simulated phosphor primaries, better matching the colors seen on actual CRTs of various types from different regions.

When using this setting, Colour System should be set to 0/r709, and Phosphors should be set to 0/NONE.

Options are as follows:

  • 0=Rec 709/sRGB (SDR HDTV/Windows gamut)
  • 1=Expanded 709
  • 2=NTSC 1953 (The OG color system that was only really used for like 5-8ish years back when basically no one owned a color TV anyway. If you are Brazillian or from a SECAM region, it may also match some old CRT TVs you’ve used with really weirdly intense greens? Hard to say. This sort of thing is kind of underdocumented.)
  • 3=RCA 1958 (?1961?) (Millennial’s grandparent’s old TV with weird colors #1.)
  • 4=RCA 1964 (Millennial’s grandparent’s old TV with weird colors #2.)
  • 5=SMPTE C/Rec 601-525 line/Conrac (Baseline standard gamut for Analog NTSC.)
  • 6=PAL/Rec 601-625 line (Baseline standard gamut for Analog PAL.)
  • 7=Dogway’s NTSC-J (Baseline standard gamut for Analog NTSC-J.)
  • 8=P22_80s (Dogway’s Grade gamut for 1980s-early 1990s TVs.)
  • 9=Apple RGB/Trinitron PC (Should approximate basically any Trinitron monitor from 1987-the mid to late 1990s. By the early 00s, they were SMPTE C instead, at least for high end monitors like the FW900.)
  • 10=guest’s Philips PC (Gamut used by a number of extremely popular monitors that used Philips tubes, including Philips CM8533, Philips VS-0080, and Commodore 1084)
  • 11=P22_90s (Dogway’s Grade gamut for mid 1990s TVs with tinted phosphors.)
  • 12=RPTV_95s (Dogway’s Grade gamut for late 90s/early 00s rear projection TVs that game manuals said you shouldn’t play games on due to burn in risk.)
  • 13=Display P3/P3-D65 (Common wide color gamut. Variant on the gamut used for film with shared primaries. Might be useful in the future if someone makes a WCG pixel game that looks best with a CRT shader?)
  • 14=Rec 2020 (HDR gamut. Again, might be useful in the future if someone makes a WCG pixel game that looks best with a CRT shader.)

New Display Subpixel Layout for BWRG and BRG displays

The LG G5 has an BWRG subpixel layout, necessitating the addition of this option.

Scanline Multiplier/Divisor

Multiplies or divides the number of scanlines.

Useful for cases like DOS games meant for 31KHz displays, which output 320x200 that was then double scanned to 640x400.

The divisor options are handy for displaying increased internal resolution output from 3D cores that don’t include a good downsample option, such as PPSSPP. I strongly recommend using this setting in conjuction with crt-guest-advanced-ntsc’s Internal Resolution setting to reduce shimmering.

  • -1,0,1=1x (Default/off)
  • 2=2x (Doublescan)
  • 3=Auto 2x (Automatically doublescans any content with a vertical resolution of less than 300, while leaving higher resolution content unchanged)
  • -2=1/2 (Reduces the scanline count to one half default)
  • -3=1/3 (Reduces the scanline count to one third default)
  • -4=1/4 (Reduces the scanline count to one quarter default)
  • -5=1/5 (etc.)
  • -6=1/6
  • -7=1/7
  • -8=1/8
  • -9=1/9
  • -10=1/10
  • -11=1/11
  • -12=1/12
  • -13=1/13
  • -14=1/14
  • -15=1/15
  • -16=1/16

Test versions may also include some or all of the following, sometimes in modified form:

  • Image Adjustment (2024.02.07) by hunterk
  • decoupled-guest-advanced-ntsc/pal by Azurfel, based on crt-guest-advanced by guest.r and Dr. Venom, based in part on Themaister’s NTSC shader
  • bfi-simple by hunterk
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Eventually, i intend to add Adamanttron to the shader repository, but i want the BWRG subpixel layout to get some testing first. Since i do not have access to a G5, this means a public beta.

Adamanttron20260709-BWRG-beta-test

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