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.
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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.
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Thank you, I’ll try out what you’ve suggested. I’d like to try out Sony Megatron shader pack but I don’t have a 4k HDR display.
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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.
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Wow, so much useful info I didn’t know, thanks.
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Here’s a look at one of my latest presets…
CyberLab Megatron 4K HDR Game SNES Composite Slot Mask Smooth Ultra.slangp
This might be a good watch for those who might be interested in CRT Technology and CRT Shader Preset development.
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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.
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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.
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Global brightness 0, integer scale mode 0, non integer scale % 100.
There is a tiny cut off
.
Not true, no other shader made ps2 games look as crisp as this one does, also it looks a lot how I remember those games looking on a crt.
I had no idea such a thing exists, sounds interesting, I’ll try that out.
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Hi, enjoying your presets as always, so what would be the latest Mega Bezel version that your presets fully worked with?
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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.
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So you would just have to load up your game, then load the Blending and Transparency preset.
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Then go into Shader Parameters.
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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.
I’m glad you’re enjoying my presets!
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, I understand.
I noticed you released an update that fixed blending and transparency, thanks for taking your time.
I’ve been lately using the wii preset, I’ve noticed that when I apply it with the latest mega bezel version 1.16.1 I like it more than when I use version 1.14.0, in the older version the mask is too big and it breaks when I try to remove the bezel as usual, in the newer version it seems like the mask type is different and it’s small and everything looks crisp and it doesn’t break when I remove the bezel, I maybe wrong though. Sorry to bother you, but could you look into that?
You’re welcome.
This can happen sometimes but it’s still not the intended look.
Hmmm…this might be highly subjective, also, I absolutely love the look of the Wii presets which are represented in the screenshots I posted of Muramasa: The Demon Blade.
Another thing is not all Mask Sizes and patterns work well with all combinations of game/core resolution and screen resolution so there sometimes needs to be a compromise in order to strike the right balance.
Someone who sits far from a larger screen might appreciate still being able to make out the details that “sell” the CRT effect, while for someone who sits up close possibly on a smaller screen, they might find the details too noticeable or exaggerated.
That sounds strange. I don’t think you’re even supposed to see the Bezel in My Wii preset. If that is the case and you can ensure that your Mega Bezel installation is setup correctly, then switching the Aspect Ratio to Full or 16:9 in the Mega Bezel Shader Parameters might allow the game to take up the entire screen.
There would have been quite a number of changes to the underlying shaders which would warrant testing and trying to update my entire preset pack a very tedious and almost impossible task and to what end? To get things to look exactly like they did before?
Keeping up with shader updates is like keeping up with the Jones’s it’s almost an exercise in futility. So realistically don’t hold your breath. If you take a look at what I’m doing with the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor shader, you will see that that is where my interest, heart and passion currently lies.
To go on to focus on something that I’m just not as interested in at the moment, makes it become work and I really do this in my very limited spare time in order to relax and enjoy looking at my games because it is so time consuming that I seldom get to actually play games.
Another thing is, a picture paints a thousand words so it might help if you included photos or screenshots of the things you’re describing with the presets as that might probably give me some added information as well as inspiration.
So don’t worry, there might be a new generation of CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack but in its current form, I’ve managed to accomplish basically everything I set out to and I’m sure you haven’t even scratched the surface of the amount of different looks and things you can do it with, for example combining it with different overlays and backgrounds and other Mega Bezel Projects and the like.
If you’re using a 4K display and the Mask too big, you can simply use the presets in the Le’Sarsh_4K_Optimized folder.
Alternatively, you can use the presets in the 1440p or 1080p folder.
If you read my posts concerning the Le’Sarsh_4K_Optimized folder or my CyberLab Special Edition Presets, you might have gleaned that piece of information.
So take the time to read the entire first post. Download some of my videos and look through the wide variety of screenshots on this and the Please Show Off What Crt Shaders can do thread and you might find that what you are asking for might already be possible or included.
Eventually you can learn how to customize the presets further to your liking by just making a few adjustments to the Shader Parameters.
That is also along the lines of the vision of the Shader creators. They want users to “dig up” and delve into their creations more so than needing to go a middle-man just to enjoy their work.
I don’t mind the feedback at all. It’s good to know that people are interested in and enjoying my work. So this might lead to me becoming more interested in taking things forward.
So do try the suggestions I have made and be sure to read the entire first post at least once.
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Yep, that’s what I’m doing now, it’s fairly complicated. Crt shaders are such a niche thing, there are very few people who understand it. With shaders I aim for the most “platform accurate” look and you are the only person who has a very good eye for this thing. Thanks to you I managed to get a satisfactory result for most consoles. Now I am trying to make a “perfect” shader for 480p platforms, but I lack the technical knowledge of how they look on an actual crt tv, your wii preset seems to be pretty good.
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Here are the screenshots of the wii preset with different versions of mega bezel:
This is with the latest mega bezel version: https://imgur.com/aYYMgjG
And this is with the 1.14.0 version: https://imgur.com/5IoyHnB
The first one looks nice and clean and the second one looks like a different mask type and it’s too dark. Just trying to find out the technical reasons for this difference and which one would be more “correct”.
This version of Mega Bezel Reflection Shader is currently untested and unsupported by my CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack.
If you would like to find out these kinds of technical details then you can probably ask @HyperspaceMadness or @guest.r in their threads what has changed in their shaders since the last version of Mega Bezel Reflection Shader that my preset pack supports was released.
You can also look back through the threads and GitHub accounts and you can see the history of what has changed.
I can tell you that it’s a lot that has changed.
So I really wouldn’t be able to give you much assistance with a combination of shader and preset pack versions that is untested, not recommended and unsupported. That would not be a valuable use of my time.
If something is too dark, there are simple ways in which you can brighten it though. They will not have the same brightness on every display.
There are also various presets and preset packs which don’t give the Mask Strength and detail priority.
At this point you’re not making sense. You don’t want the bezel so you try to disable it. Yet I have a CRT-Royale preset pack as well as a Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset pack which don’t include any bezels. Why don’t you use those instead?
Now you mention that a preset looks too dark when Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor has solved that brightness headroom limitation with the use of HDR and other users have been using presets like this for years now without issue, they just know that in order to accurately emulate a CRT, you need a lot of brightness so they run their displays at full brightness. Even Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor in SDR mode tells users to set their display’s brightness to the max.
I personally don’t have to do that on my display because it’s bright enough and has more than enough contrast at the everyday settings I use. Users with different displays, calibration settings as well as different tastes, mileage may vary of course.
If you want presets which are generally brighter but might make compromises elsewhere, why not try Sonkun’s, Hyllian’s, RetroCrisis’, Zomb’s and other presets?
I know you may not like RetroGames4K’s or NesGuy’s presets if you think some of my Mega Bezel Presets are too dark.
So if you want to have a really special CRT Shader experience maybe you should look into upgrading or maximizing what you can get out of your display because that’s the biggest bottleneck when it comes to things like this and you have to be very careful what you buy because you can easily end up with something that’s rather unsuitable.
You can’t go wrong with an LG OLED TV or even one of their brighter, modern IPS offerings. Even in my preset pack there are presets which vary in brightness. There are even presets called “bright”!
So you see what happens when you try to provide variety and lots of choice? You still can’t please everybody.
So why is it that you don’t want the bezel, want things to be brighter and seem to want the latest advancements yet, you’re not using my preset pack which has support for HDR or allows you to turn your SDR display’s brightness to the max and uses more up to date base shaders and is currently the only one that is being actively developed and supported?
This is not a question I can answer. I don’t even use a CRT for reference. Maybe someone with a more critical eye or view of these things might be able to assist.
It might be better to use imgbb to share screenshots as it gives you the option to share the full resolution not recompressed image.
I don’t know if imgur allows that but if it does, I don’t know how.
Unfortunately, Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset pack will probably never look any good on my current monitor no matter what, even at max brightness, CRT Royale presets don’t look that good either, Mega Bezel presets are great in almost every aspect and look great on most monitors, that’s why I prefer them.
My only issue right now is finding a good shader/preset for 480p consoles, since almost noone cares about that and almost everyone just upscales the crap out of them, which is not always the best look, especially with games that still used prerendered stuff.
Did you mention what make and model or resolution it was already? If not, feel free to share.
Were you using these presets with their corresponding Blargg NTSC Video Filters which they were designed to go hand in hand with?
Good things come to those who read by the way…
Read these posts carefully and you might find exactly what you’re looking for.
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