Color overlays

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

Noob here, but major old school rep… Posting this because I’m not getting any hits looking for a shader that emulates a simple color overlay.

I have memories of 2 specific examples: Super Bug (Atari arcade) and the Magnavox Odyssey home console. Anyone remember the old Sears Wish Book? (there’s an obscure reference :upside_down_face:).

I never saved enough allowance money to buy an Odyssey back in the day but I spent hours pumping quarters into Super Bug (it was the one video game they had at the bowling alley!). SuperBug had a clear plastic yellow circle stuck to the screen - dead center, over the bug. You can see the effect in the mp4 here:

All that said, I’ve been gearing up my man cave with a RetroArch based system and my wizkid son is helping me with the tech. He created a shader for my SuperBug emu but I’m having trouble getting it going on my Atari fight stick I bought on clearance from MicroCenter. He says it doesn’t compile (failed message pops up when we select it in the RetroArch menu). I’m a developer as well and not having much fun navigating the GUI and the file system for a clue as to why it simply wont load. Note that it works fine on the PC (the fight stick is a Pi4 based RetroPie/EmulationStation).

Bottom line: is there a platform (built-in) shader I should look for?

Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

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#2

In Retroarch you can use the Mega Bezel for applying a gel overlay like this

No Gel:

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image1920×1080 705 KB

Gel On

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image1920×1080 739 KB

Full Screen

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image1920×1080 694 KB

Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

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#3

Thanks!

Seems like my search fail was not knowing to use the term “gel”… apparently an “overlay” means a lot more :nerd_face:

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#4

also, RetroArch prints shader compiler errors to verbose logs and stdout, so if you can post the errors, we may be able to guess what’s going wrong.

#5

I went looking for logs and attempted to navigate the ES gui in quest of enabling the logs (assuming they were turned off by default) and I got nowhere.

I’m currently working on updating the baseline versions installed in the fight stick. The installer automatically ran on first boot and pulled a bunch of stuff from the git repos of years past. No clue how out of date this thing is.

#6

yeah, i don’t know how you would do that in emulationstation. I suggest launching RetroArch directly, or, if you can’t do that, load something in ES that runs in RetroArch and then get into the menus from there.

#7

It took me some effort to update this thing to RetroArch 1.15 but now looking for this shader (or any slangs) comes up empty. Tried to do Online Update but there’s no slang option. Tried to change the video to coregl but the only options are gl (the default), sdl2, vg and dispmanx.

Note, my version of RetroPie is old (4.8.4 - had to update RetroArch from source). Worse case I can try to re-image the whole thing and go through the pain of rebuilding the MicroCenter/Atari value-added assets and roms from a backup.

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#8

Unfortunately slang only works in DX11, Glcore and Vulcan. Also if it’s on a pi I don’t think it has enough power to run the Mega Bezel, as it’s pretty demanding compared to the average shader.

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