Blight Presets Shader Pack

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

Notice: to center everything in a single post, I removed previous entries, but older presets are still available in the download links at the bottom of this post, if you don’t like what comes with the default collection.

Blight Collection

Tidying up a few presets, I decided to bundle everything together in a single collection. It’s my most recent work and consists of all the lightweight shaders that I had the skill to come up with something acceptable. This mostly supersedes previous packs, as it contains almost everything those had, plus a few tweaks.

Important: these presets are not supposed to be accurate, but to improve overall picture quality compared to no shader at all. Consider them as an LCD screen wearing “make-up”, borrowing a few traits from CRT technology, but suited to and tailored for the average monitor/television, and light on computing resources. Nonetheless, accuracy was still considered and pursued, as long as it didn’t introduce sizeable performance hit or require specific hardware or software.

Overview

  • Main focus is still in being fast, subtle and dispensing high brightness. It should cater to most hardware and screens around.
  • Size is also tiny, with the uncompressed folder having less than 300KB.
  • Shaders used were: crt-gdv-mini (slightly customized), crt-easymode (slightly customized), crt-hyllian (old version, slightly customized), crt-geom-mini, crt-nobody (old version) and ntsc-adaptive (old version).
  • There are presets for:
    • Regular console and arcade games (01-gdv-mini-sharp, 02-gdv-mini-smooth, 03-easymode-plain, 04-easymode-color, 05-hyllian-stark, 06-hyllian-sharpest, 07-geom-mini-bright)
    • Vertical output, for specific arcade games (10-vertical)
    • Handheld games (20-handheld-gdv, 21-handheld-easymode, 22-handheld-gdv-lut, 23-handheld-easymode-lut)
    • NTSC simulation, for nostalgia and better blending (30-ntsc-hyllian-stark, 31-ntsc-geom-mini-bright)
  • Also included are some color correction options (LUT-composite, LUT-nec, LUT-ntsc, LUT-rgb, ntsc-colors), in the color-correction folder. Those presets are supposed to be prepended to the previous ones, or whatever other one you want.

Download and Installation

  1. You can download a .zip file with a folder containing the latest version with everything you need here: https://files.catbox.moe/zn77lk.zip (last updated in 2025-02-19)

  2. To install, just unpack the .zip file and put the 0-blight-collection folder wherever you want, as long as RetroArch has the means and permissions to access it. As a suggestion, you can place the folder inside your main shaders directory.

Thank you, thank you

  • DariusG (creator of crt-gdv-mini and crt-geom-mini)
  • Easy Mode (creator of crt-easymode)
  • Hyllian (creator of crt-hyllian, crt-nobody and ntsc-adaptive)
  • Guest (original creator of the work on which ntsc-adaptive and crt-gdv-mini were based)
  • All shader and presets creators, you are awesome!
  • You, the reader, for taking your time to visit my thread and check my tiny contribution.

Download Links for the Older Presets

14 Likes
#7

This seems pretty special right out the gate, I took 5-Old Tube from Redux, prepended it with Cheap Sharpen, and with absolutely zero tweaking it looks really accurate.

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image1920×1080 587 KB

Some people might like to turn the Aperture Grille to 2 to make it more apparent:

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image1920×1080 594 KB

But yeah if it were me, I’d say prepend the NTSC shaders with Cheap Sharpen and it’s too bad these aren’t incuded with RetroArch.

RetroArch really needs an easy to select, sharp NTSC shader out the gate.

2 Likes
#8

You can try the “Blargg_NTSC_SNES_Custom_pseudo_xxx…” video filter presets in Settings–»Video–»Filters.

For even more of them you can try my CyberLab Custom Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets.

They can be combined with most if not any Shader but they don’t work with every core out there.

2 Likes
#9

Thanks for the feedback! The Redux version uses Hyllian’s amazing work. It’s the most accurate CRT rendition among the lightweight shaders. Many people slept on his work. Another good one is CRT Consumer, by DariusG, but I don’t include it for it’s a bit heavier than the scope of my packs.

1 Like
#10

I have an absolute monster of a PC, so I don’t mind using heavy shaders at all…but it’s kinda nice having Comma not freeze the game for half a second. lol

I was using CRT Royale + GDV’s Adaptive Sharpen until the CRT Beam Simulator came out and didn’t work as a prepend with Royale’s hardware scaler. So I checked out Hyllian and I agree it’s really nice. I almost stuck to it for my presets and I think that screenshot above is evidence of its value. I’m so sorry to hear people slept on his work.

If I could take a good picture of what my Sony Vega looks like with that same game to show you how close it is, it’s almost as if the screenshot was from when the TV was new 20ish years ago.

1 Like
#11

I stick to lightweight shaders because there are too many presets for more capable machines. And even if I wanted to make those, there are far more skilled preset makers already.

Up until ten years ago, I had only the most basic PCs, so everything I played was thanks to developers paying attention to less fortunate people. Thus, I kinda want to give something back, curating and tweaking lighter shaders that still look pretty, so the majority of users can enjoy it, even if their hardware is lacking.

3 Likes
#12

I updated RetroArch’s Assets and is it me or do your Hyllian presets not load anymore? :o

#13

That shouldn’t be the case, as the presets are self-contained. Everything they need is inside their own folder, and they don’t look for any file inside the main shader directory. I did it like that precisely because most of the shaders I use are older versions, which do not belong in RetroArch anymore.

Granted, there’s always the possibility I did some blunder, so please check the logs for some error and paste here. You could also download the pack again and extract to a separate folder, to ensure no conflict happens.

1 Like
#14

Oh, I see what happened. I got switched off of Vulkan to d3d11 cause sporadically Vulkan will start crashing until I switch to d3d11 for a little bit. So weird…but yeah, that’s all. My default shaders happen to still work in d3d11 so I didn’t notice.

2 Likes
#15

Good to know you figured it out. Unfortunately, I don’t use Windows, so I can only test my shaders in Vulkan and OpenGL (glcore driver). If you encounter any further errors that I might help you with, let me know.

2 Likes