You should use 424x240 here for Sonic Mania to get NTSC Rainbow to work. NTSC Rainbow doesn’t work at high width (Resoution_X) resolutions.
Also, I can’t do much about the red & black flickering without some error logs.
This is a ReShade bug. Remove all the other CRT-Guest-NTSC.fx TEST files from the Shaders folder. Then see if the Rainbow effect works.
This is why I said you should copy & paste the TEST versions into the existing CRT-Guest-NTSC.fx file.
Don’t forget to check if any of these work too (by copy & pasting) - CRT-Guest-Advanced, HD and NTSC for ReShade!
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Finally at last !!!
Thank you so much for your patience, kindness and help, bud !
solution:
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remove the test files. they will this resolution bug in reshade
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424x240 - This was important to know. I didnt see anywhere on this mod thread to have it that way. Which ONLY works if added up alongside the next step.
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Performance mode. I’m not sure if it was specifically intended to use with this mode but, neither I saw this step as requirement since first post OR anywhere across the mod thread. I didnt see anywhere around here suggesting it.
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In RetroArch, step 2 is automatically done, so these 2 last steps seem like specifically required for this game OR the rainbow NTSC effect.
Thank you once again, it looks wonderful. And yes, from one of your previous questions, dithering + Rainbow banding both together make magic in this game. It definetely benefits from these old school effects.
I was looking for Rainbow effect since years on this mod thread. I can nothing but thank you so much for updating Guest’s presets into ReShade. You and Guest made the perfect combination this time.
@sonkun This effect may be useful to you, besides being outside of RetroArch.
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Need to ask by the way, in case its possible to be made but, do you know if this project could be possibly imported to RetroArch or ReShade ?
The old 90s NTSC/Pal looking is amazing and its a shame that is a 3+ years old post and there are no news about this project just yet.
It could be an alternative to Guest’s NTSC preset.
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Updated the shaders to the latest (crt-guest-advanced-2025-06-20-release1) version!
CRT-Guest-DX9 (Seems like some GPUs still need this.)
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Awesome! I’ve been wondering about something for a while, though. How would one figure out the content’s resolution outside of RetroArch? For example, I’ve been assuming a 800x600 res for pcsx2 and Dolphin, just to set something reasonable and with 4:3 ratio, but I know RA would not use that value.
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I just do 1920x1440 (4:3) on my 1440p monitor for both PCSX2 and Dolphin. And then just set Internal Resolution at 4.0 to blur/blend the image.
You’ll need something like Res-O-Matic to run PCSX2 and Dolphin (or any other emulator) at 4:3.
I even use the same settings for some older PC games -
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Oh man, I didn’t think about converting the monitor resolution to a 4:3 ratio with PC games… This eases the color bleed from the mask that led me to mess with shadow_msk values a few posts pack.
In my case it’s 1440x1080 for a 1080p monitor, if I’m not mistaken. Might need to experiment with the horizontal res a bit too, but this is an improvement.
I’ve also been increasing Internal Resolution for some PC games like Resident Evil 1-3 ports with the REBirth mod, so at least that’s something I was doing right.
Not sure what’s the difference between leaving pcsx2 and Dolphin at native res and 4:3 vs. using Res-O-Matic, though. I’m on Linux so that software won’t work very well.
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I use Res-O-Matic to avoid pillarboxing (black bars on left and right) in standalone emulators.
Without Reso -
With Reso -
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@DevilSingh maybe better adding parameter like Resolution_X and Resolution_Y but for Aspect Ratio? so it will only did CRT-Guest-Advanced in 4:3 internally without the need of something like Reso
You can use something like - AspectRatioSuite for that. I just prefer Reso as it allows me to not only change the resolution, but also the refresh rate on a per game/emulator basis.
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thanks for mentioning this! I will test it
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Unfortunately it seems it not do what I think, and if you think about it, even if it do work as intended there will be many problems like the crt mask will be distorted
also in
it not only the black bars, it also the sharping, so I think it’s better to add new AspectRatio to CRT-Guest-Advanced and ntsc-adaptive reshade shaders
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The second image looks sharper here because both images here uses Resolution_X at 1920. Which you can imagine will look blurrier in the first image, as it is 2560 width in size.
Perhaps to clarify, the way I understand it: Reshade shaders apply to the whole screen. This is different compared to Retroarch which applies shaders to the active pixels the content is running at.
Res-o matic is just a tool to quickly change/start apps with the desired res/refresh in your system. On Linux you could e.g. define hotkeys.
Strictly speaking, you don’t to change the resolution to a 4:3 one, but it can be useful.
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you sure it’s not because ntsc filter treated 4:3 as 16:9? anyway I noted this in my side not only in the imagines above
dolphin
Retroarch as you can see, the 16:9 is blurry but the 4:3 is sharper like the one from retroarch
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true, and that make the image blurrier in reshade
I’m 1000% sure. Some examples -
Resolution_X = 1920 (4:3) -
Resolution_X = 1920 (16:9) -
Resolution_X = 2560 (16:9) -
I think I might know what the issue is here.
Please post your Resolution_X setting for both 4:3 and 16:9 Dolphin images here. And also what upscaling (like 4x, 8x) are you using in the RetroArch Dolphin core?
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Resolution_X=720 in both 4:3 and 16:9, but in 4:3 as you can see my screen resolution is 1440 not 1920
in retroarch I use no upscale, same for standalone Dolphin, also I get same result using pcsx2, and I think the problem will be the same in 240p consoles but I didnt test since retroarch suffices my needs for any console released before the year 2000