CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader Preset Packs

Thank you for the awesome response!

I’m working on a 42" HDR OLED (LG C2), on my desk, so about 12"-18" away.

I have your near-field on my box, but haven’t gotten them to load yet. Config issue I’ll work on tonight.

I’m working on SH1 on PSX. It’s a challenge because the geometry and textures are both potato, so scaling up breaks the immersion. But the art is also amazing, so trying to extract the most out of it at native res is a fun challenge.

In-game is 224 lines, while menu and map screens are both 480 lines.

Here’s a couple of examples of the scan line difference at 224 and 480 (I can’t recall the specific preset I was using here)

480 (map screen)

224 (in-game)

The original pixels (widescreen hack). This is the brightness I’m aiming for. Tricky to get.


As an aside, I took one of your cybertron shaders, disabled scanlines, and then rotated the phosphors 90deg. The net effect is very mild horizontal scanlines (control wires from the trinitron?), which helps with prominent horizontal aliasing at 224, without having to upscale. Lighting is too dark, and it loses maybe too much detail, but the blend is phenomenal and it works great at near-field.

Cyber,

Figured out why I couldn’t get the near field presets to load.

The presets reference “shaders_slang/xbr/…”

The current xbr location on a new RA install is: “shaders_slang/edge-smoothing/xbr/…”

I think it was this change here: Repo reorg: edge smoothing, interpolation, and pixel art scaling (#469) · libretro/slang-shaders@259ff81 (github.com)

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I’m aware of the changes to the folder structure.

I never thought to check the paths to ensure that they were up to date.

This doesn’t even affect my previous gen shader presets.

I’ll update my paths as soon as I get a chance.

This could also be a factor in why @g5k and possibly others couldn’t get my presets to work at all.

Thanks for pointing this out.

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I’m curious as to why? How are you sure that this is the “correct” brightness?

Don’t you think that the devs of the game would have expected some brightness to be lost via scanlines or rather tested their game on a CRT with actual scanlines and adjusted the output of the game to suit?

Also, what preset is this you’re using? Have you delved into my CyberLab Neo-GX stuff?

There are many ways to achieve a brighter image using the shader parameters but since you’re using an HDR capable display, one of the easiest and best methods would be for you to simply enable HDR and follow the steps in one of my previous posts.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. When it comes to shaders, there are many interesting ones and there is always something to choose from. However, what I care most about are image filters that can simulate specific “interference”, “artifacts”, “noise” - generated by the composite cable connected to the TV. Unfortunately, although I have tested various crt shaders, I have never found one that generated it as well as the blargg filters. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Crt - composite image on the snes9x emulator with the blargg filter enabled. The image is very faithful to the real CRT TV. I know it’s probably not possible, it would be great to see such filters for PSX, C64 and Amiga one day.

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CRT-GUEST-ADVANCED-NTSC can do all of this arguably just as well as Blargg NTSC Video filters.

Makes me wonder what exactly you’ve tested, how long ago you tested and how many shader presets you tested. It also makes me wonder if you adjusted any if the “knobs” before coming to this conclusion.

I’ve seen this video before. It’s not really what I would consider reference quality probably due to the compression artifacts and low resolution.

Just remember things are always in motion in this field and there have been great strides in NTSC emulation over the past 12 months.

One of my few remaining issues with the Guest-CRT-Advanced-NTSC solution is some strange combing looking horizontal artifacts that I notice when things like the rainbow effect in Sega Genesis games are also present.

Can’t remember if that happens in real hardware but I’m not sure if it will be visible if I enable merge fields but then that wouldn’t be accurate to Sega Genesis.

I don’t think I’ve noticed it on the Blargg Genesis Composite Video Filter but the default setting used in Genesis Plus GX as well as Nestopia and Mesen has too much dot crawl for my taste.

I have so many NTSC presets, including entire line of CyberLab Neo-GX and CyberLab Megatron and Megatron NX presets and to me that type of look that you’ve described, isn’t as exclusive and elusive as you make it seem.

Also, there is not any single look or image that is representative of what a CRT looks like as they have a wide variety of characteristics depending on the make, model, type of tube, mask, resolution, calibration, age and more.

Example videos:

CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack YouTube Playlist

This is what CyberLab Turbo Duo for Blargg + Blargg_NTSC_Turbo_Duo_SNES_PSX_S-Video_CyberLab_Special_Edition looks like!

CyberLab Turbo Duo for Blargg + Blargg_NTSC_Turbo_Duo_SNES_PSX_S-Video_CyberLab_Special_Edition

This is what CyberLab SNES looks like!

CyberLab SNES

This is what CyberLab Genesis for Blargg + Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_S-Video_CyberLab_Special_Edition looks like!

CyberLab Genesis for Blargg + Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_S-Video_CyberLab_Special_Edition

This is what CyberLab NES for Blargg + Core Blargg NTSC S-Video looks like!

CyberLab NES for Blargg + Core Blargg NTSC S-Video

CyberLab NES for Blargg + Core Blargg NTSC S-Video

CyberLab NES for Blargg + Core Blargg NTSC S-Video

CyberLab_Turbo_Duo_Composite_Slot_Mask_IV_OLED_NTSC + CFRS_Mega_TV

CyberLab_Turbo_Duo_S-Video_Slot_Mask_IV_OLED_NTSC_II + CFRS_Mini_TV

CRT-Guest Advanced Ladder Combing Artifacts

You can use MPC-HC, MX Player or VLC Player to view the videos.

Here’s a look at some of my latest presets!

CyberLab Ultimate Virtual Slot Mask CRT-1P2RTA

New Preset and System Recommendations

TVch34 Overlay

Plus

TVch34 Overlay + Mega Bezel

Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor YouTube Playlist

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No preset for this screenshot, just raw pixels from the emulator, with 32-bit rendering and no dithering.

Great question about developer brightness intent. It’s difficult to get a perfect gauge of brightness. In addition to raw pixels, I’ve been looking at (really rough) CRT captures to try to get a ballpark reference. I played this game a lot as a young man, so I’ve also got some (fuzzy) memory reference.

image

image

( Silent Hill (PS1) on a CRT (youtube.com))
Silent hill on CRT : silenthill (reddit.com)

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@keylimesoda Just use CyberLab Megatron NX 4K HDR Game PSX Composite Slot Mask Smooth Near Field.slangp or one of my PSX NTSC, Neo-GX PSX or CRT-Royale PSX presets and call it a day.

Be sure to calibrate your display brightness using the in game Options menu.

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Try those from Sonkun. They are perfectly sorted by Mask Type, Curved/Uncurved, Resolution and then by Cable type, PAL/NTSC and warmth.

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This error:

[ERROR] [slang]: Texture name ‘PrePass’ not found in semantic map, Probably the texture name or pass alias is not defined in the preset (Non-semantic textures not supported yet)

Is very likely because your preset has been saved as a full preset, but then the shaders updated and are now expect different things to be in the preset.

For the future I would recommend saving your presets as simple presets which would avoid this issue.

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I don’t think that’s how developers did things. It would be impossible to account for all sorts of CRTs that way.

SDR was the standard so they mastered for 80-120 nits. Most CRTs can hit this brightness level.

And they obviously made their games with SD sets in mind considering their games were always 320px wide at best, not with higher resolution/TVL tubes in mind. Because what most consumers had at home were sets between 200 to 400 lines.

When retro devs say they accounted for scanlines they are referring to active scanlines and they are talking about stuff like color bleed(also known as the half dot technique by Japanese devs) for example used in arcade games like Mortal Kombat or Metal Slug where the devs would sometimes use particular CRTs to get the image they wanted.

Nobody actually wanted the blank scanlines in their games, they were considered an artifact, but at bigger screen sizes and sharper screens the blank scanlines were a lot more prominent but that was the trade-off for making say an Arcade game look more impressive via screen size.

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Thanks, I used to do that but I then I wanted my newer presets to be more or less stand alone and in a steady state.

What I think actually happened in this case is that when I started building my latest preset pack. I started with a preset that referenced the old folder structure rather than the new one.

I knew I had encountered that and rectified it in past preset packs so I didn’t expect it to rear its head again.

I think it should work well now for users with new installations since I updated all of my presets using the new folder structure.

My hope is to one day include self contained shaders along with my presets as you do with the Mega Bezel. That way the output would remain the same once a user is using a particular version of my preset pack.

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It’s been a while since I last posted one of these:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/7Sga3tPZqw

…and these…

I wonder who’s going to be the first CRT Shader Guinea Pig to test one of these?

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Debating which TV to get and considering this one, but a bit hard to justify a miniLED for double the price of a good OLED (LG C3) for the same size.

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I think it all boils down to your usage scenario and preference. My old OLED eventually started to get some burn-in of scanlines.

I don’t know if I would go OLED again, although so many great strides have been made in burn-in prevention that the new OLEDs may not be at much risk relatively.

Then, there is the brightness advantage and shaders and presets like the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor really shine when given as much brightness as possible.

Then when it comes to everything else, for example Movies and stuff, this particular TV is supposed to be providing an “OLED like” experience when it comes to micro contrast while beating any OLED in the highlights.

I think it seems good enough to at least give it a try.

At least the Sony that is, due to its next generation dimming processing, which seems to be providing a high level of granular control.

More than any other Mini-LED I’ve seen or read about to date.

Then as an added bonus, it might even have an RGB subpixel layout.

So the bottom line is that it should be better in certain areas and worse in certain areas compared to OLED but in areas where the previous generations of LED/LCD tech have fallen flat against OLED, this TV should at least be somewhat competitive.

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I wonder what would make CRT shaders look better though: high brightness on MiniLED or perfect blacks on OLED. Then there’s also latency which is supposedly smaller on OLEDs in general, but I suspect such a high-end SONY TV also does that well. Will try to find the BRAVIA 9 side-by-side along a C4 or G4 in a shop to compare in person.

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Remember, all CRT Shaders are not the same. A shader like Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor (or any other shader that is setup to use maximum mask strength and scanline opacity) is going to end up with an inherently darker image.

High brightness, aided by HDR or otherwise is the current brute force method to counter that and the results are quite impressive.

Mini-LED TVs, while not being as precise as OLED TVs, also have perfect blacks.

I don’t think the latency factor will be much of an issue unless the screen display is really horrible at it.

An OLED TV’s extremely low latency can actually be a disadvantage in some scenarios leading to a more jittery/juddery experience due to frames not transitioning and blending smoothly into one another.

This is noticeable on things like slow scrolling end credits in movies for example.

While the MiniLED won’t have per pixel perfect black levels the contrast ratio should be just as impressive if not even more so due to having true blacks in the areas which should be black and at the same time being able to push higher peak and sustained brightness in the highlights.

So theoretically, both should be quite impressive but it all depends on if the local dimming algorithm can keep up with the action and just works without being noticeably late to kick in or making a mess of things.

Sony has shown where their algorithm/processing is a cut above the rest by demonstrating a highly detailed greyscale map of the image using their Mini-LED backlighting system with good granularity between light to dark per Mini-LED zone.

Remember something only has to be good enough by a certain threshold before we reach the point of diminishing returns.

Now this is all hype and speculation until someone or some people actually go out and try the TVs themselves in these scenarios.

High Brightness headroom is extremely important when used with CRT Shaders to be able to use BFI.

Besides improving motion clarity on the whole the mask tends to appear as a blur on sample and hold display technology when thing start scrolling and moving fast on the screen.

Higher levels of BFI reduce this effect while improving motion clarity so that’s a possible win for the Sony Bravia 9 Mini LED in theory but we will have to see who is brave enough to put it into practice.

@Nesguy bought a 1,000 nits Mini-LED monitor but was not impressed by the local dimming in CRT shaders but the high brightness was still sufficient to provide him with a wonderful experience overall to the point where he no longer complains err…posts often about negative or unsatisfactory experiences.

This Sony Bravia 9 is supposed to represent the next level or generation of this local dimming processing but it has been hyped and marketed quite a lot so we’ll see.

Then there’s the no burn-in and possibly more accurate subpixel layout.

I would definitely give it a try if I was in the market for a new TV but either way, you should be satisfied.

Just remember this, with HDR and high brightness, coupled with highly intense scanline gaps, you introduce an almost worst case scenario for uneven wear of OLED subpixels, which is what I think eventually took place with my TV.

Modern OLED TVs are supposedly more robust but who is to say it can’t happen with them as well?

@hunterk provided me with a shader that shifts the entire screen up and down by 0.5 pixels over time, so this in theory should help the unused subpixels to be used but it might need some fine tuning because if used in timer mode the pixel shift can be jarring and noticeable during gameplay and unfortunately it doesn’t work with Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor out of the box at the moment.

Someone who knows more about these things than myself might have to be be able to figure that one out.

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@Cyber

hey hows it going I decided to use my phone to zoom into the TV, I wanted to ask if each mask looks ok and If not what can I do to fix them.

https://imgur.com/a/86kWhqH

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Hi @Cyber,

We spoke on the Retro Crisis channel. As I said, I couldn’t get the CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack to work on Linux. Have you already run these filters on Linux?

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Greetings @kayzzen01,

I haven’t but I’d be surprised if others haven’t.

Are you getting an error when trying to load them? If so what is the error message?

Have you installed everything into the prescribed folders?

If possible, please post a log using pastebin.

Are you able to load any Mega Bezel Reflection Shader base presets or variations that are included with Mega Bezel Reflection Shader?