Sorry that im probably asking stupid questions for you, but it says the latest matching HSM mega bezel shader version, but i cant figure out how to check which version of those shaders does your presets use. Im currently using the latest version and it seems to be working fine tho ?
Nah, it’s okay. It’s not stupid but I do sense a lack of passion, determination and will from some though. Everyone isn’t the same but it saddens me when I feel like people don’t even try or don’t try hard enough.
I strongly suggest you take some time to read through the first post and at least browse the thread if you want to make the most of the potential of these preset packs as there is a slight learning curve.
Okay
Well what exactly do you define as working? Are you sure that what you’re seeing is even remotely close to how those presets are supposed to look? If you do then I guess ignorance is bliss and you obviously can’t miss what you’ve never seen.
Not to be taken personally micro-rant aside, feel free to ask questions after reading through the first post and admittedly outdated readme.txt files and I’ll be happy to answer as many questions as I can as all I would like is for others to experience the same joy, awe and nostalgia that I experience.
1 Like
Atualizei ontem e tudo perfeito. No Core do Genesis tudo perfeito. Trabalho fantástico. Parabéns Cyber, ficou perfeito.
1 Like
I’m happy to hear that! Which preset pack and preset are you referring to? Is this the new Mega Bezel in HDR or W420M?
Some photos or jxr screenshots would be nice!
usando seu shader na Tv Crt Sony Wega.
Coloque em Super Resolução no RetroArch, 2560x240.
Ficou sensacional.
2 Likes
Estou usando o SDR, não testei ainda o HDR.
Mas estava com preguiça de editar o HDR.
Mas fica perfeito em SDR também.
Tenho medo de deixar em HDR por causa do Burning.
Mas agora estou testando na Sony Wega 
2 Likes
Isn’t that considered cheating? 
You should do some comparisons with the Shaders set to off.
By the way what graphics card are you using? Also, your Mega Bezel version looks old. How come you haven’t updated to v1.14 yet?
That is a valid concern, especially if you’re not mixing your content. @hunterk created a shader which shifts the image down and up by 1 scanline so that there wouldn’t be uneven wear caused by the scanline pattern on OLED TVs.
It doesn’t seem to work properly with Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor yet though but it would be a nice feature to have built-in and maybe continued to be worked on.
In the meantime, enjoy your redundant shader tests…lol. Maybe you can try turning off the Mask and Scanlines. I can understand using shaders on a CRT Monitor but not a standard definition consumer TV because the TV and the Shaders are doing a lot of the same things.
Hello Cyber. I don’t have anything important to say other than thanking you for your hard work. I just discovered this 2 days ago and spent like 2h looking into documentation and settings.
Can’t wait to get back home on Sunday to try it. Cheers!
1 Like
Thanks for the help and the quick reply. I’ll try your other suggestions too and let you know how it goes, but first the quick answers.
I was surprised too, but for some reason there’s a very clear boost in brightness/contrast/saturation (not sure exactly) of the bezel when the NX shader is turned on. Since the game’s brightness is naturally dimmed by the shader at the same time, it makes the screen overall look very odd. It’s particularly bad with brighter bezels like the Famicom one.
To be clear, these screenshots were taken back-to-back with 100% opacity on the on-screen overlay. The only change was turning the shader on/off. The forum is limiting me to only one photo per post (new account) so I’ll embed the screenshot with the shader turned on first, then follow-up in a separate post with the shader turned off for comparison.
I’m using a Beelink SER7 mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU and an integrated Radeon 780M for graphics. It can emulate just about anything you throw at it, but I assume the lack of a separate GPU is what’s holding it back with those Mega Bezel shaders. I haven’t spent much time trying to troubleshoot it yet though, just a quick test to compare with the HDR presets I had already configured.
And thanks again for the tips, I really appreciate it.
1 Like
If the shader was being applied to the overlay, you would see scanlines and masks e.t c and the same darkening happening to the overlay.
What you’re seeing is the effect of HDR being enabled and detected by your display and everything being brightened as a result. Windows has a calibration tool to control the brightness of non-HDR content when HDR is enabled but that may not have an effect here if you’re using th Vulkan driver. It may not necessarily work if you’re using D3Dxx.
Seeing that there’s no way to lower the brightness/Gamma of the overlay from within RetroArch to make it more HDR+CRT Shader friendly the best option I can think of is to adjust the brightness/Gamma of your overlays using some graphics/image editing software.
You can always save the edited ones as HDR versions or (for HDR) versions.
It’s not the lack of an external GPU, it could be the lack of a powerful enough GPU.
Have you tried the lower performance tiers, MBZ__2__PERFORMANCE_NO_REFLECTIONS, MBZ__3__STANDARD, MBZ__4__Standard_No_Reflections?
These IGPUs need fast system RAM in order to perform at their best. Do you know the speed/specs of the RAM installed? A Dual channel configuration is also a must.
Cooling and proper ventilation is also very important for maintaining performance.
What resolution are you running these presets at again?
You’re most welcome. I hope you enjoy using them as much as I do.
2 Likes
That shot looks amazing and really shows that we have a long way to go with display tech before we can emulate CRTs
P. S not sure if you’re aware but there is an amazing fan remake of Final Fight which runs at any aspect ratio(from 1:1 to 64:49) and any framerate, supports original arcade resolution/refresh rate for 15khz CRT output, supports any controller imaginable, built-in retroarch shaders, can play as every character in the game(albeit in a limited fashion due to having to work with the original sprite set), cleaned up graphics, all 3 soundtracks(Arcade, Sega CD, X68000), surround sound support, sound effects ripped straight from the original PCB etc. it has all sorts of things going for it to list really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXcWg6oF__k
You can download it here by clicking on ‘‘Latest Photo Album’’
This remake engine is also open source and you can use it to make your own game or remake an old one.
4 Likes
Thanks for the heads up. I knew about the other fan game Final Fight LNS Ultimate but had no idea about this one. If you’re into these kind of fan games you should also check out Streets of Rage X, it’s shaping up to be a good fan game next to SOR Remake.
1 Like
I saw that LNS Ultimate thing, but to me it looked like a crappy MUGEN-tier hack.
Big Blue Frontend’s remake started around 2018(or earlier) and it’s done all by one single guy with an insane engine written from scratch. It’s completely autistic(in a good way).
I didn’t elaborate that much but the gameplay is changed quite a bit, there’s juggles like in Guardian Heroes and special SF2-style moves, elaborate grab mechanics, dedicated pick-up button so that you can punch things while holding an item so as to not waste it if you don’t want to and all sorts of mechanics etc. He even wrote his own pixel shader.
Really it’s way too insane of a list to keep track of. I’ve been following his updates on youtube for a long while. Very outspoken and a bit of a nutty boomer and goes off on hilarious rants… that said the work he put on this over the years is just ridiculous.
Crazy thing is that he still updates it from time to time, the built-in retroarch shaders was one of the last updates he did a few weeks/months ago. Now he’s working on a Samurai Shodown 2 port with the same engine, only this time around he said that unlike with Final Fight, he will stay faithful to the original gameplay.
1 Like
I really didn’t get that from that one photo. Haven’t you seen good CRT Shader Photos or CRT vs good CRT Shader comparisons?
…and the interesting thing about that photo is that it it showing the output of a CRT Shader running on a CRT, so how can you tell which one it’s desirable qualities are coming from?
Take a look at some of these photos:
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/v5lm5FLGvh
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/Rrlp0IUqru
https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/rXd5s5Q5SE
@Cyber I meant the brightness, the colors and the subtle glow effect
The phosphor detail a little bit too
1 Like
The lack of scanlines and masks is a good point, I hadn’t realized that. So you’re saying that Windows is overcompensating for the darker game image and blowing out the brightness/colors of the overlay as a result? I’ve been using Vulkan as the default driver for everything with this PC already by the way, but I admit that I don’t entirely understand the difference between that and the other options.
I was able to get some of the “no reflections” presets (both standard Mega Bezel and CyberLab presets) to work with the Duimon bezels after my last post, but I didn’t care for the game’s look compared to the HDR-specific presets. Depending on whether I turned on the HDR setting in RA or turned it off and used auto-HDR from Windows instead, the colors were either too saturated or too washed out for me. I got similar results with the other non-HDR CyberLab presets I tried. I could try them again with HDR turned off entirely, but the bezel designs weren’t a big enough leap in quality compared to the basic overlay bezels (especially without reflections turned on) to make it worth fiddling with the settings since I had already found an HDR preset that I liked.
I think this is the way forward for me. I was able to compensate for it a little bit by lowering the opacity of the overlays in RetroArch, but that only helps so much. Plus it looks weird when you could see the corners of the game image peeking through the edges of the fake TV.
- The product page lists the RAM as “Dual DDR5 Channel (SODIMM Slots×2, Up to 5600MHz, Max 64GB)”.
- I don’t expect cooling is the issue since it takes a while for the heat to build and the thermal throttling to kick in on this PC and the reflection shaders make the framerate drop immediately.
- I’m using a 4k HDR non-OLED display from TCL. I’ve already been editing the shader parameters to match. Again, I guess I could try lowering the resolution or turning off HDR to get better performance, but I’d also be surprised if I preferred those results to the 4k HDR presets I’ve already got running.
Sorry I meant to drop the product link earlier with the additional specs but I forgot while taking screenshots:
Also sorry for the delay and the out-of-order replies earlier. Apparently my account is still too new and requires mod approval for every post.
1 Like
It’s not that Windows is overcompensating. It is that we are trying to compensate for sending a very dark overall image to the screen by using a brute force method to extract as much brightness as possible from the display.
The overlays are not a part of that darkened image so they must be darkened to match or they will end up overly brightened.
You’re doing too much without providing valuable feedback with photos of the screen and settings. How am I supposed to assist if we can’t go through this step by step? I’m not able to visualize and process all this at once in my head.
So you do something and it looks washed out, there’s a reason for that. It would be nice to know what preset you tried, and stuff like that to guide you as to what’s the next step.
The most important thing to remember is that you have to adjust your Peak and your Paper White Luminance values.
Unless you’re doing external Tonemapping, HDR always needs to be enabled in RetroArch Video Settings.
If using a Sony Megatron preset, HDR also needs to be enabled in the Shader Parameters of the Preset itself and you have to adjust the Peak and Paper White Luminance from in the Shader Parameters of the Preset itself.
If you’re using any other shader you they won’t have Peak and Paper White Luminance settings so you’ll have to adjust those settings from the RetroArch Settings–»Video–»HDR menu.
So once you understand this, let me know and we can take it from there. For now, you need to stick with one preset or preset pack and get that to work before going all over the place…
Have you looked up your TV on RTINGS or other review sites to determine its Peak Luminance yet?
1 Like
Sorry, I glossed over the details because there’s been a 24-48h delay between each of our replies to each other so it’s hard to remember the exact details I’ve tried in the last few days. I’ve figured out how to lift the requirement for all of my posts to be approved by an admin though so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
I also didn’t want to waste your time with the details since I decided they were irrelevant to my needs by then anyways. I was just trying to briefly report my findings after trying your suggestions, even though the results appeared to be a dead-end for what I’m looking for myself. The use of either RA’s HDR setting or Windows’ auto-HDR wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped when combined with non-HDR presets because of the effect on the color saturation. Even though I didn’t have the time or knowledge to know exactly why that’s the case or how to fix it, I still thought that could be valuable knowledge for the help thread.
The only reason I was jumping around was so I could better understand my options between different preset packs before fully committing to a single system and dialing in those settings for every single console and core in Retroarch. I didn’t go into details with my Mega Bezel experiments because I was already happy with my configuration of your 4k HDR Megatron presets (including the shader parameters for peak luminance, paper white luminance, sub-pixel layout, screen resolution, CRT resolution, and HDR, most of the details found by following the Retro Crisis video guides) and I didn’t see any of those non-HDR preset packs providing enough of an advantage over my current settings after briefly checking them out. Spending the time required to troubleshoot the oversaturated/washed out colors didn’t seem worth it to me.
Really the only issue I had left was the blown-out overlay bezels, but it sounds like editing the PNGs to compensate is the easiest solution for that. That’s just a matter of trial-and-error, something I can easily handle on my own. Sorry if my rambling didn’t make that clear in my last post and thank you again for the help and advice, and of course for your hard work on making these presets and sharing them with all of us as well.
2 Likes