Any good scanline shaders for 720p?

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

After playing around with shaders way too much, I’m about ready to give up - it seems like there are a million options and nothing that will work for me. I’m running RA on a Raspberry Pi Model 2, so I know there are lots of users in the same boat as me.

All I’m looking for is a shader that will produce good scanlines that are adjustable in strength/brightness and that look good in 720p. Something that resembles the output of a Framemeister. I don’t care about replicating bloom or shadow masks or any of that other stuff.

The CRT shaders look fantastic, but most are simply too demanding to be run on the Raspberry Pi.

Scanlines.glsl looks good at 1080p, but the scanlines turn into dots at 720p, and the lines aren’t dark enough for my taste. It also does not fix uneven pixel scaling.

NTSC Gauss pass won’t run on the Raspberry Pi - I see scanlines, and that’s it - no picture .

CRT Hyllian is okay and I think it’s my best bet, but there is some unnatural looking bloom and there is a weird moire pattern that appears when the screen gets very bright or displays a white background. I’ve tried figuring out how to edit the cg file and convert it to glsl to no avail.

CRT Caligari is also okay but the lines are not dark enough.

I’m stumped. Is there just no good option for getting decent scanlines and even pixel smoothing/scaling at 720p?

1 Like
#2

[QUOTE=Nesguy;21932]After playing around with shaders way too much, I’m about ready to give up - it seems like there are a million options and nothing that will work for me. I’m running RA on a Raspberry Pi Model 2, so I know there are lots of users in the same boat as me.

All I’m looking for is a shader that will produce good scanlines that are adjustable in strength/brightness and that look good in 720p. Something that resembles the output of a Framemeister. I don’t care about replicating bloom or shadow masks or any of that other stuff.

The CRT shaders look fantastic, but most are simply too demanding to be run on the Raspberry Pi.

Scanlines.glsl looks good at 1080p, but the scanlines turn into dots at 720p, and the lines aren’t dark enough for my taste. It also does not fix uneven pixel scaling.

NTSC Gauss pass won’t run on the Raspberry Pi - I see scanlines, and that’s it - no picture .

CRT Hyllian is okay and I think it’s my best bet, but there is some unnatural looking bloom and there is a weird moire pattern that appears when the screen gets very bright or displays a white background. I’ve tried figuring out how to edit the cg file and convert it to glsl to no avail.

CRT Caligari is also okay but the lines are not dark enough.

I’m stumped. Is there just no good option for getting decent scanlines and even pixel smoothing/scaling at 720p?[/QUOTE]

Have you given a go at crt-geom (cgwg), to see if that suits your needs?

#3

Hello twipley,

I’m currently using crt-royal and I would like to try crt-geom but I cant find it with the latest nightly, is it normal?

It used to be included with the stable version.

Thanks.

#4

I’d love to use that one, but it’s way too intense for the Raspberry Pi 2.

It really is looking like there just isn’t any good low performance option for just getting simple scanlines in 720p. This doesn’t seem like it should be that technically difficult, and there are a lot of users who would benefit (Raspberry Pi users).

I tried the scanline overlays, but they’re terrible - for some strange reason, not all of the scanlines line up with the pixel edges, which just looks awful to my eyes.

Right now I’m trying to figure out how to edit CRT Hyllian to remove the bloom and moire effect, but I really suck at this stuff. I downloaded the cg to glsl conversion script but I can’t get it to run. I also don’t even know if this will address the moire problem at all; it’s kind of a shot in the dark.

#5

The interlacing.cg shader is close to xrgb-mini scanlines at 720p, but setting it to 3x causes uneven thickness of scanlines, even at integer scaling. It also has the brightness adjustment just like the settings in xrgb-mini.

#6

You can use The crt-hyllian standalone. This will get rid of the bloom. :slight_smile:

#7

This one looks fantastic at 720p, but for some reason picodrive doesn’t look right with it - I get a weird moire effect if I set the resolution higher than 640x480, but I think this is an issue with picodrive itself.

I’ve been telling everyone that this is the best shader to use for Raspberry Pi, as it doesn’t cause a performance drop compared to the other CRT shaders and it looks great. Thanks!

#8

Hello, please pardon the necroposting: I’m also searching for a good basic shader (scanlines) in 720p for my RPi3 (I’m using LAKKA). Since with crt-pi I only get a grid, I’d like to test crt-hyllian, but where could I find this “standalone” version? Thanks

#9

They’re referring to the regular ol’ crt-hyllian in the ‘crt’ directory. That is, not the glow/halation version.

Also, check out misc/scanline-abs-sine and misc/scanline-fract, if you’re looking for a basic scaline shader.

#10

I have the same setup (Lakka on RPi3) and have been using the scanline overlay for 720p (at 25%) with the sharp bilinear simple shader for getting better looking horizontal stretching. It looks OK for me and runs great, in fact I notice no performance hit whatsoever.

The relevant retroarch.cfg settings are:

input_overlay = "/usr/share/retroarch-overlays/rpi/scanlines1280x720.cfg"
input_overlay_enable = "true"
input_overlay_opacity = "0.250000"
video_scale_integer = "true"
video_smooth = "false"
video_shader = "/tmp/shaders/retro/sharp-bilinear-simple.glslp"
video_shader_enable = "true"

You get something like this:

scanlines_720p
scanlines_720p.png1280×720 76.9 KB

#11

Thank you. But in latest LAKKA stable release I can’t find anything in the “misc” directory.

#12

Thank you. Where could I find this overlay?

#13

If you can’t find the overlay, check that the overlay path is set correctly:

Settings > Directory > Overlay > /usr/share/retroarch-overlays

Then choose the overlay from the quick menu, the subfolder is rpi/

#14

There are no presets in the misc directory. They’re all individual single-pass shaders, most of which are used by other presets. The basic scanlines are the exception to that rule.

#15

Ahhhh now I see! :grinning: Thank you very much!

#16

I play at 720p. You might find what you are looking for in easymode and fakelottes (the latter being superfast too). Also, check this thread out if you haven’t yet :slight_smile: