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.
Hmmm…it’s always nice to have some visual feedback to go along with the mental image.
This darkness might be a combination of personal preference, differences in monitor calibration as well as SDR brightness capability. If you look at the vast majority of my presets, they tend to prioritize the CRT Phosphor Mask, that approach trades brightness for mask integrity and definition.
If things look too dark, you can adjust either of the Gamma Settings.
As for the Yellowish look, I can’t really say much about it, except that you can probably tweak that by using a different colour space. I think I might have switched it to DCI-P3.
You can try switching the Phosphor Type and also adjusting the White Point.
They look how they were supposed to look on my display at the time I made them. Yours and other users mileage may vary due to subjective factors as well as display difference. Feel free to adjust your display or the shader parameters to suit your preferences and/hardware.
I also endorse the CRT-Hyllian Shader Preset Pack, which inspired the creation of my CRT-Royale Preset Pack. So you can also try that one out and see for even more variety.
It also has options for different a Mask Layout. A mismatch here can also cause things like you’ve been experiencing.
You can use any combination you like but I specifically made and tested my CRT-Royale Presets with my 3rd gen Blargg CRT Filter Presets. These are included with the CRT-Royale Preset Pack and also available separately in my CyberLab Blargg NTSC Video Filters Preset Pack.
That Blargg_SNES_Pseudo_PSX_Composite preset you’re using is one of my 1st gen Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets.
One thing I tried to focus on when making my 3rd Gen Blargg Video Filter Presets was brightness/Gamma consistency so you might find that the later presets darken the image less than the older iterations.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
If all you wanted was one of my Mega Bezel Presets without the bezel, why didn’t you say so?
You can just turn off the Bezel and adjust the scaling to fill the height of the screen.
This has been asked a number of times and guidelines have been posted so you can search the thread to find out how to go about doing it.
Just start with the No_Reflections presets as you won’t be needing those to be calculated.
By the way, have tried my CyberLab Sony Megatron Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack? It can be a lot brighter and has no bezel.
You don’t need a 4K display nor an HDR display to use Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor.
It works on 1080p, SDR/Non-HDR displays as well. The most important thing is for the display to be bright enough. You might have to turn your brightness up to the max in order to use it.
You’ll also have to switch the presets from HDR to SDR and 4K to 1080p in the Shader Parameters.
Concerning removing the bezel in my Mega Bezel Presets, here’s a link.
Feel free to also ask about this in the Mega Bezel thread. It’s been asked many times before. If all you want is to remove the bezel then there’s no need to have to use an entirely different shader or preset pack.
Hi again, I tested the mega bezel smooth advanced presets again, it seems like they really don’t have blending and transparency effects, while shaders from the standard folder do, at least that’s the case for the 1080 optimized ones. I’ve tried to download and install them again multiple times, same effect, please check it out. By the way, I managed to disable the bezel like you recommended, they’re nearly perfect now, thank you, although the corners are cut off a bit and I’m yet to find the option to make them normal. In addition to that, I’ve been enjoying your wii preset for ps2 and gamecube games, it’s perfect, but as you know the retroarch ps2 core doesn’t work very well. Is there any way to get the same shader for the standalone pcsx2? I know the crt guest advanced and dr venom shaders have been ported to reshade, but I’m not sure how to install them properly, there’s little to no information on how to do that, let alone replicating your wii preset.
It seems like you’re correct, in that the 1080p Smooth Advanced Blending and Transparency Presets and possibly others no longer work.
That probably occurred when HSM switched from MDAPT to Hyllian SGENPT-Mix De-dithering.
At the same time, my Blending and Transparency Presets are a bit old now and I spent a lot of time working on modern alternatives.
If you look in the screenshots you’ll see several Genesis presets in the Console Specific Folder and almost all of them blend dithering and pseudo-transparency. So, I might fix the Blending and Transparency presets at some point, you can also just revert to the last Mega Bezel version that they worked with, since absolutely nothing would have changed for the better by updating the Shader with respect to those presets.
In the meantime, I strongly suggest you try the presets with the words "NTSC’ in their name or the ones which have “Blargg” in their name, which would require the loading of Blargg Video Filter Presets to get the blending and transparencies.
Also, please take the time to read the first post as all of these alternative solutions have been introduced and explained right there.
Feel free to share how you did it because users can always use a clear and up to date guide.
Post a screenshot as a picture paints a thousand words.
You can try the WindowCast core or ReShade.
I’m not too familiar with either of them either so you can try to do some reading up. My Re-Shade presets are based on the old Guest-Dr-Venom Re-Shade port.
The last time I checked, there was nothing too special about my Wii preset. It’s just a Slot Mask, I think it’s 7 pixels wide and maybe 3 or 4 high.
I thought that’s what you would have found out and told me. Lol. It shouldn’t be too hard to find out though and worked “fully” is a kind of interesting statement because I’m sure there would probably be some different bugs if you were to find and revert to that version.
I don’t know what’s so special about the Blending and Transparency preset that you would want to use that over the alternatives I’ve shared but it should be pretty easy for you to fix the “issue” yourself in the Shader Parameters and continue using the latest recommended version of Mega Bezel Reflection Shader.
The screenshots I shared show what setting needs to be changed in Shader Parameters.
So you would just have to load up your game, then load the Blending and Transparency preset.
Then go into Shader Parameters.
Then scroll down until you find [--HYLLIAN SGENPT-MIX DE-DITHERING--]
Then in the Line directly below it, change the Mode: from 0.00 to 3.00.
After that, go back then click Save, then Save a Game, Core or Directory Preset and this preset with this setting will be applied automatically every time you load this Game, Core or Directory depending on which one you chose to save the preset as.
You can also choose Save As and give the preset a new filename.
You can open this preset with a text editor, then copy the corresponding line of code which you just set and paste it into the existing Blending and Transparency preset.
Nothing really special about them, especially considering all presets in the standard folder seem to be working perfectly fine, I just wanted to make sure everything works as intended, so it was bugging me that maybe other presets have bugs too and I’m not getting everything out of them. I already tried reverting to mega bezel version 1.14.0 and not only it didn’t fix blending and transparency, it broke some other stuff that looked fine before. So I think I’ll just stick to the latest version of both your presets and mega bezel.
Most of these aren’t really “bugs” or errors in the design of my preset pack per say. They’re just things that probably weren’t updated yet or accidentally not updated to take consideration of changes in New versions of Mega Bezel Reflection Shader.
What happens is that I often get things to a point where I’m satisfied then there’s an update to Mega Bezel which changes lots of underlying Shader Code as well as the names of settings or even what the values do but keeps the same names.
When this happens, if my presets have to continue looking as they were, I would then have to find out what was changed and how to get the equivalent effect in the new version. So it used to be kinda like a game of cat and mouse or wackamole depending on how you look at it.
So don’t feel badly about using an older version with an older preset. You probably won’t be missing out on anything with respect to that particular preset.
Do remember that if you change versions of Mega Bezel Reflection Shader that due to the aforementioned, you would also have to switch versions of my preset pack to match that version. I hope you didn’t mix versions.
As soon as I get a chance, I’ll see if I can add the line to for new dedithering parameter to all the presets that used the old MDAPT deditherimg parameter before.
It shouldn’t be too difficult but free time is not easy to come by these days then I’ll have to fiddle with GitHub.
I’m not in a hurry to update anything to use the latest Mega Bezel Reflection Shader though. That would mean lots of testing to make sure everything still looks as intended and it already looks as it should using the previous version 1.14.0.
I tend to actively develop and share what I use and right now I’m currently using Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor. So I have to come out of my current workflow in order to update the Mega Bezel Presets.
You should try what I suggested though, it’s really quite simple.
By the way 1.14.0 is the recommended version of Mega Bezel for my latest Death To Pixels Mega Bezel preset pack so if you were to revert to one version prior, that would probably be version 1.13.0.
