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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
Thanks very much! I sometimes miss my CyberLab Neo-GX Ultra Shader Presets but once you go HDR it’s hard to go back. Why don’t you try enabling HDR in RetroArch’s HDR Menu and see what happens when using them with the latest HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader?
It’s something I planned to experiment with sometime in the future and a couple users have reported great results using my presets with Windows 11 Auto HDR.
I’m surprised so few have tried to go that route using other shaders outside of Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor since its been available for so long and as far as I remember HDR was tried and tested using Mega Bezel + DX11/12 and the results were very impressive.
Is it that users think Sony Megatron is required to use HDR with CRT Shaders in RetroArch?
Wow! Thanks! I think I remember you having a very good experience. I can’t remember if you shared your method with the masses before but is it as simple as setting your Peak and Paper White Luminance values in RetroArch and adjusting the Mask Strength then everything just works and looks better?
Hmmm…that’s a tough one. I see my presets as if they were my collection of virtual CRTs. I can’t really say that I have any favourites or best as I have loaded up older presets in the past and been quite impressed with the way things looked.
I tended to focus on different aspects of CRT emulation at different stages. Some of my earliest were of the Aperture Grille variety, then I focused on Slot Mask for a while.
In between I made some Lottes presets before I did my Neo-GX presets, which started off as Dot (Shadow) Mask but quickly evolved into Slot Mask and Aperture Grille (CyberTron) as well.
Now I’m playing with HDR using the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor shader after I had a wonderful time reinventing things via the CRT-Royal Shader.
All of them have their flaws, strengths and weaknesses but in general they’re great starting points for being able to do some awesome things with RetroArch.
There was a time when I was using my CyberLab Soqueroeu-TV Special Edition Presets and another when I was using my CyberLab Special Edition Presets complete with homegrown overlay Graphics!
So it’s been a fun and exciting journey creating all of these so that people like myself can play around with and switch between the different looks and ways in which to enjoy their games.
TV lines = Horizontal Resolution, which means vertical lines(640x480 has 640 vertical lines)
Vertical resolution means horizontal lines(like e.g 480p has 480 horizontal lines)
It seems counter-intuitive but it makes sense when you think about it
I’m glad your preset packs have really blown up - they look great.
So do we have correct subpixel spacing for slot and Aperture masks for WRGB Oleds now?
I tried your most recent pack on my 65’’ C2 and I still cannot get slot masks to display correctly without the phosphors looking too large/coarse. If I lower the size it looks to small and a lot of mask detail is lost.
I just purchased a Hisense 75’’ U8K for my den which is a mini LED TV with a BGR sub pixel structure and masks look incredible compared to my C2.
We have that using the CRT-Guest-Advance family of Shaders. Which powers the vast majority of presets in my CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack.
Using Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor, so far I have only gotten the Aperture Grille mask type to look correct on WOLED TVs.
How recent is recent? Have you tried my “Fine” and “Ultra Fine” presets?
In general if you switch from sharp, in-focus ~300TVL Mask at 4K, then switch it to a ~600TVL mask. It’s not going to look as sharp.
Do note that viewing distance plays a big role in how much mask detail can be seen or not.
Feel free to post some pics so that we can better understand what you’re experiencing.
Right now I use masks which employ two subpixels from neighboring pixels to draw one R/G/B phosphor colour. That’s how we get the 300TVL presets which were really meant to be viewed from a distance of about 6 feet on a 55" screen.
My fine presets should look in-focus from that same distance but if you really want to peep at the pixels and phosphors, you’d need to get closer. Like on a real CRT, you probably wouldn’t be noticing individual phosphor colours unless you were really close to the screen.
I know there are Green/Magenta subpixel masks which might be able to provide other TVLs and are supposed to appear as RGB when viewed but I haven’t really had much luck with those on my OLED so I stick with RGB Masks.
By the way, in my CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack, there’s a folder called Le’Sarsh_4K_Optimized, also the 1440p Optimized Folder and in my CyberLab Neo-GX folder there are “Fine” presets. They are all based on the same 1440p_Optimized Mask structure, which is RBGW I think.
I compared the number of emulated phosphor triads with a picture of a JVC D-Series playing Super Ghouls and Ghosts and the 1440p Mask structure had a similar number of triads to the JVC D-Series TV when used at 4K Resolution.
The 4K_Optimized ~300 TVL masks were too coarse so sometimes at the edges of text or lines, there were some aberrations due to the subpixel elements “spilling over the edges”.
That’s great! Let us know more about how it performs. I am sure that there are some folks who would like to be in the know about which displays work well and which don’t for these purposes. So any reviews or anecdotal information can help in this regard!
Thank you for the replies. I’ve got a few more questions about crt royale presets. I’ve noticed most of them are rather dark and kind of yellowish. Are there any setting in the shaders that I should tinker with to improve that? Are they supposed to look like that or should I configure my monitor to make them look good? I mainly play psx games and I’ve used “fine_psx” preset with blargg_pseudo_psx_composite" (or something like that), is it a valid combination? Overall, your presets are the best I’ve tried so far. My favourite shader so far is mega bezel psx composite preset, however I’m still looking to get a similar result without the bezel, crt royale presets look decent, but a little too dark.
