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Hi @Cyber,
I really appreciate all the effort you’ve put into these presets and for monitoring this thread and providing advice even to this day.
It’s my first time using RetroArch and these shaders. I was hoping you could give me some advice for which preset would be the best for me and any small tweaks I need to do to get the best quality image.
Might be an extremely niche use of your presets, but here’s what I’m trying to do. I have Resident Evil 2 Biohazard, the Sourcenext port for pc. Essentially, it’s a pc port of a psx/gamecube/dreamcast game, so I thought I might use one of the console specific presets. I’ve figured out how to have RetroArch apply its shaders on the game using WindowCast that you recommended, and it works great, but I don’t know what resolution to make the game. Should I use the original 240p resolution that the game came out in? Should I use 640x480 that windowCast recommends? Also, I want to play the game on my LG C1 OLED. You probably already know, but it’s a 4k HDR display that has the ability to use black frame insertion (BFI). Should I turn that on? Should I turn the HDR on or keep it in SDR? Should I use one of the OLED presets or one of the 4k HDR presets? Maybe I’m overthinking it and I just need to try each to see what is best, but again, I’m brand new to this so you most certainly know things that I don’t know about what presets to use and how to adjust them. Are there any settings in retro arch or the presets I should change? I also have an RTX 4080 and 12700kf with 16 GB RAM. Is that enough for the highest quality presets? Anything else I’m missing or should know about?
Any help is super appreciated, even if it’s an “idk bro, figure it out yourself”.
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Thanks.
Nearly everything we do here can be considered niche/bleeding edge/experimental.
I don’t think WindowCast recommends 640 x 680 resolution.
It recommends finding out the native resolution of the content i.e. 1 x resolution scale.
I think it’s best to let your eyes be the judge for what you think is the best resolution to use.
If you try 240p, you’ll probably get the most defined and visible scanlines.
At 640 x 480 the scanlines tend to disappear or almost disappear.
There are pros and cons to either approach. Higher res can lead to less aliasing but scanlines also help reduce the appearance of aliasing as well.
You can get the best of both worlds using the latest Mega Bezel Reflection Shader or CRT-Guest-Advanced shaders which now have support for Hi-Res Scanlines (Hi res graphics + regular lo res scanlines).
Since I have so many different preset offerings, I can’t really give you a one size fits all answer for this question.
You can probably try my latest Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset pack using HDR Mode and see if you like it.
Once you have that setup and running correctly, feel free to introduce BFI and see if the cost/benefit is worth it to you.
What I would say though, is that if you’re used to whatever motion clarity you’re experiencing now without the use of BFI. Using it can spoil you, making you more sensitive to motion clarity issues and it could be hard to switch back.
The main downside to this is that you’ll always lose brightness when using BFI and brightness is essential to making most of my presets look good on any display.
So my presets have been tuned for around 600nits, which is the minimum recommended brightness for Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor.
If you use BFI and go below that, you might gain better motion clarity but ruin the visual experience in other ways in the process.
So to enable any type of BFI while preserving the best of both worlds, your display really should have an insane amount of brightness headroom.
Browse this thread especially the first post. Read the readme files of my preset packs and look at the RetroCrisis videos, especially the most recent one to figure out how to set things up correctly.
Since you’re using an 4K LG OLED TV, which is what most of these presets were designed on, you shouldn’t have much setting up to do on the Shader Parameters side but you should still calibrate your Peak and Paper White Luminance to what your TV supports for the best possible experience.
My highest quality presets are my Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor presets and those can run on a cell phone or Raspberry Pi4.
The Mega Bezel stuff can be a little resource intensive if using the higher performance tiers but I run those on a GeForce GTX 1070.
Remember Rome wasn’t built in a day so take your time to learn things one step at a time.
By the way, you can also apply CRT Shader effects via ReShade. CRT-Royale, CRT-Guest-Advanced as well as Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor all have ReShade ports.
Hello CyberLab. Amazing progress on your passion project here.
I had a question regarding the CRT-Royale section of the preset pack. I’m trying to replicate the Sonic waterfall section. I’ve applied both the shader and the filter but can’t get the transparency as shown off in the retrocrisis video.
Any guidance is appreciated. Thx
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Greetings @MIKEBLK!
Thanks very much.
Strange, can you tell me which emulator cores you’re using in addition to which shader presets and filter combinations you’ve tried?
Note that those particular video filters don’t work with all cores so you can try a different core and see if they do. I use Genesis Plus GX. Also note that if you’re using external NTSC video filters, you should turn off any internal ones found in the Core Options.
Also, your display resolution?
Screenshots and/or photos of your display showing the issue might greatly assist in getting to the root of the problem as well.
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Whts up man. Appreciate the quick response. I’m using Genesis Plus GX as well. Video filters ‘OFF’ in core options.
Lmk if I left out any pertinent information. Thx Cyber
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I see that you’re attempting to use my “Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_S-Video_CyberLab_Special_Edition.filt”. Why not try the filter prresets that I specifically designed (but not exclusively) for and included with my CRT-Royale Shader Preset Pack, specifically the ones with the “III” at the end of the filenames?
What happens when you try the ones below? Have you tried these?
Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_S-Video_CyberLab_Special_Edition_III.filt
Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_Bad_Composite_CyberLab_Special_Edition_III.filt
Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_RF_CyberLab_Special_Edition_III
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I missed the part where the correct pairing was with the “III” series filters. I tried the 3 you mentioned above but the result was the same.
It’s not necessarily a correct or incorrect pairing thing but I did design my 3rd Gen Blargg NTSC Filter Presets for use with and in conjunction with my CRT-Royale presets.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use any filter preset with any shader preset but I just wanted to make sure you were using a preset that actually was supposed to blend dithering without having to resort to testing them to see.
I’ve since tested both my 1st and 3rd gen Genesis S-Video Filter Presets and they both blend the waterfall in Sonic The Hedgehog.
So there might be something amiss somewhere in your setup. When last did you use a video filter preset and it worked?
Do the Genesis Plus GX included Core Options NTSC presets work?
Do you notice any change at all when you load a filter preset?
I notice I’m using Genesis Plus GX (v1.7.4 3b85b24) while you are using (v1.7.4 5ca4135).
Have you updated your cores recently?
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I had always used a shader preset, alone. I recently saw the progress made on CyberLab and wanted to give it a run with both the shader and filter.
Yes.
Tough for me to say, but clearly there is a difference between my picture and yours. Something isn’t working on my end.
I usually update the cores when I have a chance to play. Should I be on the same version that you’re on?
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Not necessarily, I’m just keeping an open mind here. Sometimes things can break. I’ve been using filter presets for years across multiple updates for multiple cores and have never had filters stop working.
You can try some other cores and see if the video filter presets work for you.
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Cool. Appreciate you taking the time to troubleshoot this with me. If I come across something that fixes my issue I’ll throw it up here in case anyone is having a similar issue.
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No problem. You can try different things to see if you can isolate the issue. For example try a fresh installation of RetroArch or try renaming your retroarch.cfg file.
Try the filters without any shaders to see if they work. It could be a permissions issue.
Also you can try creating a log and using pastebin.com to share it.
Try testing it on a different system. By the way, what are your colour settings like? Are you using RGB 4:4:4 Full?
Try updating or reinstalling your graphics driver.
You can also try switching between the latest nightly or latest stable build of RetroArch. Try 1.15.0 and all and see if that one works better.
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Seasons Greetings everyone!
This is a compilation of CRT related videos that I’ve saved including a few which demonstrate how to get immaculate recordings off of a CRT TV and by extension an HDR CRT Shader.
Also, I’d like to announce the release of CyberLab Megatron Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack - 23-12-23.
This release contains some more refinements to my CyberLab Megatron Fine and Ultra presets.
These presets represent another milestone in my Shader Preset Pack development as they mark my departure from focusing on low res/low TVL CRT emulation and into the realm of medium res/medum TVL CRT TV emulation.
They should certainly be a treat for those who sit nearer to their screens but they’ve been tested and designed even with those who sit far in mind.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back to low TVL ~300 TVL CRT Shader Presets so feel free to make some noise about these if you try them and like them.
So this is like another preset pack within a preset pack.
One column of subpixels on the screen represents one phosphor on the emulated CRT! So it’s basically a 1:1 emulation.
I have some general tips for recording and displaying these things on YouTube. You can avoid some of the pitfalls of chroma subsampling if you try to avoid capturing/filming a 1:1 or pixel perfect representation of the shader presets.
YouTube HDR or HDR capture isn’t necessary to show the CRT Shader Presets in this regard but you can fiddle around with it if you wish.
What you can do is either keep things zoomed in in order to spread out the phosphors over multiple pixels. Or you can keep things zoomed out, which will capture multiple phosphors blended together instead of individual phosphors.
This is actually what we see when viewing from a normal viewing distance in any case.
This should be sufficient to get away from and around some of the severe quality loss incurred by Chroma Subsampling/Compression.
Anyway, as usual the download link is in the first post and I hope you enjoy using these as much as I do!
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By all means continue to at least make 300 TVL(or lower) shaders as some kind of option, if possible. IMO higher TVL just doesnt blend low res graphics as nicely. SNES and Genesis games were about 292.decimal point horizontal lines when accounting for PAR so 300 is a good enough compromise(and lower than 292 also works well enough).
Have you looked at my preset packs?
I literally have probably over a thousand ~300 TVL presets of different varieties for multiple scenarios.
The vast majority of presets in my latest Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset pack are ~300TVL.
Users can continue using them if they wish.
I’m just currently focusing on what I have been giving relatively very little attention to in the past and I like the results that I’m seeing.
This is definitely subjective as I’ve found both high and low TVL presets to blends things like transparencies and dithering well.
I think we might be talking about 2 different things because as far as I know TVL is the number of vertical lines a TV can display.
Also, what I release and share is usually a reflection of what I use personally.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/CqvSBnBlsz
You know how I get when I see a Commodore 1702 in action!
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I’d like to clarify, what’s the difference between smooth_advanced, advanced and standard mega bezel presets? Which one should I use? I’ve noticed standard presets have proper blending, for example they fix waterfall effect in sonic, while smooth_advanced and advanced don’t fix it. Also, should I use blargg video filters with mega bezel presets?
These are different performance tiers. The higher the number the easier it is on your system and lower the performance requirements.
Of course this comes at the cost of some features and functionality but they may not necessarily affect the actual preset in use by much because not all presets necessarily use all the features available to them.
You can read more about this here:
You can use any tier which runs well on your system and provides the look you’re aiming to achieve.
This might be true of the particular presets or parameter combinations you’ve looked at but this is not how it works. Presets in any tier can blend dithering. It all depends on which features are turned on or off and how the parameters are set.
This can be done with some cores. It’s totally up to you.
If you take the time to read the first post as well as the filenames of my presets, you’ll see that for some of them I recommended the use of either my Custom Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets or the Blargg Video Filter Presets included in various emulators’ Core Options.
You can feel free to use them outside of those scenarios of course.
I suggest you take the time to read the entire first post of this thread and look at some of the videos as well in order to familiarize yourself with some of the capabilities of the shaders and presets which are available to use via the downloads provided.
You can also look at the first post in this thread as well as the Mega Bezel Reflection Shader thread for further information but do take things one step at a time or you might end up overwhelmed.
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Congrats on these! I am a big fan of CyberLab_Arcade_Shadow_Mask_Smooth_Neo-GX_Ultra.slangp I use artif+fringing: 0.10; NTSC Chroma Bleeding 4.0
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