CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader Preset Packs

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/2sz7JVJZNE

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/s/cOQMY3wTKd

@Cyber I meant the brightness, the colors and the subtle glow effect

The phosphor detail a little bit too

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Okay but oversaturated/washed out colours is not surprising if you just slap HDR onto a preset that’s optimized for SDR.

So the trick is to reset most of the brightness enhancements first, for example Post CRT Brightness, Gamma_C, Brightness Boost, get your Peak Luminance, Paper White Luminance and Contrast dialed in in the RetroArch Settings–»Video–»HDR menu then adjust your Saturation.

Most of my Mega Bezel Presets are geared towards viewing from a distance so if that’s not your cup of tea, they might benefit further from a slight reduction in NTSC Resolution Scale.

I have some guides outlining how I went about converting some of my presets to HDR. Have you read those? You can also take example from my new 4K HDR Presets added to Mega Bezel by comparing what’s different from their non-HDR optimized counterparts.

The Peak and Paper White Luminance values you set in the RetroArch Settings–»Video–»HDR menu could be the same that you use for the HDR presets you have working now. You might just have to use the 240p Test Suite or a game that you’re familiar with to dial in the Contrast value.

Remember these are my Peak and Paper White Luminance settings. You have to replace then with what works best with your display.

Actually there’s another way. You can use Mega Bezel to load your overlays then you’ll have access to all Mega Bezel’s on the fly image adjustment settings including adjusting the Gamma and Brightness of your overlays and all of this can be done non-destructively.

There are examples of how to load backgrounds in Mega Bezel in my MBZ__3__Standard_Full_Reflections_CyberLab_Special_Edition folder.

You can also open one of Duimon’s presets or read over some of the last few posts on the Mega Bezel thread where Duimon recently explained a simple method of loading overlays in Mega Bezel Reflection Shader.

Lastly, Mega Bezel Reflection Shader also includes Base Presets which leverage the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor shader so you can have it all with the benefit of the low performance requirements of Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor.

I know it’s a lot and I’ll try to add further examples and useful links but it’s definitely worth it to get things setup exactly how you want them.

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Alright so I just tried to combine Mega Bezel (without reflections), Duimon’s built-in bezels, and the Megatron base shader preset. I followed your most recent suggestions on how to accomplish that while configuring everything for HDR output, using quite a few of the very helpful comments embedded throughout Duimon’s presets as well, but I’m running into a few roadblocks. I think mostly I’m just missing the exact parameters I’m supposed to inject into the preset chain.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far:

  1. Customized LITE_Bezel.slangp in Duimon’s zzz_global_params folder. Now all of the [Guest-Mini]-[Bezel] presets in the LITE folder point towards MBZ__4__STD-NO-REFLECT__MEGATRON-NTSC.slangp instead of one of the GDV-MINI presets.
  2. I edited zzz_global_params/Shader/LITE/user_Bezel.params to point towards a new file named SDR-to-HDR_TCL55.params. This new params file is saved next to no_scanlines_or_mask.params, the file which is used as an example in the comments inside user_Bezel.params. This is where I have all of my custom shader parameters saved for optimizing the base Megatron Preset for 4k HDR.

The two edits above should allow me to more easily apply these same custom parameters across all of Duimon’s relevant presets. I’ve already tested this method and it appears to be working, no broken relative filepaths or anything.

This is what I have so far in SDR-to-HDR_TCL55.params:

// Suggested settings from Cyber: 

post_br = "1.000000"
// Bright Boost Bright Pixels - 1.10
// Bright Boost Dark Pixels - 1.40
gamma_c = "1.000000"

HSM_GLOBAL_GRAPHICS_BRIGHTNESS = "40.000000"
HSM_STATIC_LAYERS_GAMMA = "0.620000"
// Saturation - (Increase by +0.31)

// Also set all Afterglow and Persistence settings to 0.00
PR = “0.000000”
PG = “0.000000”
PB = “0.000000”
AS = “0.000000”
sat = “0.000000”

// To fix Shadowmask Presets (Only for Mega Bezel 1.15.0 or higher)
mshift = “1.000000”

// For a little extra brightness
gsl = “0.000000”
maskstr = “0.950000”

// Megatron HDR settings
hcrt_hdr = "1.000000"
hcrt_max_nits = "840.000000"
hcrt_paper_white_nits = "500.000000"
hcrt_expand_gamut = "1.000000"
hcrt_lcd_subpixel = "2.000000"
hcrt_crt_resolution = "2.000000"

As you can see from lines I commented out, I can’t find the right syntax for adjusting Bright Boost Bright Pixels, Bright Boost Dark Pixels, and Graphics(?) Saturation. So far I’ve also just copied the Peak and Paper White Luminance values I was using earlier. The same values are also currently saved and active in Retroarch’s settings. I haven’t tried dialing in the contrast value yet or adjusting any of the settings for the bezel.

The colors in the game already look pretty good with these settings, though a bit darker overall compared to the Cyberlab Megatron 4k HDR preset I had already configured. Obviously I’m not too worried about that at the moment since I’m still just trying to establish a baseline. A few things are bothering me though, but with the laundry list of Mega Bezel parameters to adjust I’m not sure where to start:

  1. When my character moves and the game image scrolls, I notice a flickering effect in a few small areas of the game, particularly along rough edges in the game’s artwork where one color meets another. I think this is the “shimmer” I’ve seen mentioned before caused by issues with non-integer scaling? It’s a relatively subtle effect, but it definitely isn’t present in the Cyberlab Megatron HDR preset I was using before. It’s particularly visible in Super Mario RPG (SNES) along the edges of the dirt paths. I tried to capture it with a screen recording and with my phone’s camera, but it wasn’t visible on either.
  2. Similarly, compared to the basic bezel overlays I was using earlier from OrionsAngel, the amount the game image needs to be shrunk down to accommodate the wide frame of the fake CRT is a bit too much for me, especially since that extra space is wasted without reflections turned on. Again, I also suspect that difference in scaling is causing the flicker/shimmer effect.

If those two issues are related like I suspect, then I see two ways of fixing it. Either I replace Duimon’s bezels with OrionsAngel’s, or I adjust the shader settings to make Duimon’s bezels larger. However both solutions would also require adjusting the scaling of the game itself, not just the bezel around it. It sounds like replacing Duimon’s bezel with another is easy enough but I don’t know where to start with changing the game’s scaling within Mega Bezel.

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I can see that you’ve misunderstood my SDR to HDR tips and maybe it’s my fault for providing too many options or solutions in the same post.

While I’m glad you made some progress you might have ultimately entangled yourself even further which is the opposite of what I was trying to do. This is partly because you are trying to do more than one new thing at the same time.

One is getting HDR to work while using Mega Bezel and the other is loading your background using Mega Bezel so that you can lower the Brightness/Gamma once HDR is applied.

I gave you a few methods and examples to go about both, but instead of following one of the examples, you’ve managed to intertwine and combine bits of all of them. Now what you have is a hybrid of a hydra and a Frankenstein and this is not what I had in mind at all.

My SDR to HDR Conversion Tips are shader specific. Even more so they are specific to the Shader Preset Packs which they refer to.

My Mega Bezel tips are for my Mega Bezel Preset Pack only, While my CRT Royale SDR to HDR Conversion tips are for my CRT-Royale preset pack only. Those are both preset packs geared towards SDR displays so they are the ones which need steps to be applied in order for them to look good in HDR.

None of them are for use with the Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Base preset. Those things are not needed for that because it is already HDR ready and I haven’t any presets using that Mega Bezel Base Preset.

I also provided a link to a preset I made using the Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Base Preset which you could have used as an example if you wanted. That is more for standalone use and was a completely different example/solution. You could have used that to get HDR working in Mega Bezel and have Sony Megatron working at the same time then followed the examples in Duimon’s or my post or preset packs or my preset packs to load your background.

Let me know if you understand up to this point.

Also you have to make up your mind if you’re going to use Duimon’s backgrounds or your own.

Duimon’s boiler plate guidelines are a completely different rabbit hole. Now you’re just adding different recipes together in an attempt to make one dish. The only thing I referred you to Duimon’s post was so that you’ll get an idea of a simple method of loading a background, without having to worry about paths.

My method, based on the examples in my preset pack would need you to use the proper paths to locate your graphics.

So those are two methods to accomplish the same thing, loading a background. You only needed to choose one.

So please go back and restate what it is you need to accomplish and set about doing that one step at a time.

Getting HDR in Mega Bezel is one step. I gave you 2 Methods - use my regular mega bezel preset pack and follow the SDR to HDR conversion steps or use the Sony Megatron Mega Bezel Base preset, for which I provided an example preset.

The other step is loading your backgrounds. I gave you several methods to do this. One was using the advice in Duimon’s post and the other was using the example from my Mega Bezel presets with my own graphics/backgrounds.

You could have also used Duimon’s preset pack itself as an example or template for loading your own backgrounds.

So keep it simple accomplish both goals one step at a time. Take it slowly and seek advice before going to far down the rabbit hole.

This is because those settings in my SDR to HDR conversion guide were not for the Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Base Preset, they were for my Mega Bezel preset pack only.

If you do go the Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Base Preset route, you don’t have to worry about the Peak Luminance, Paper White Luminance or Contrast in Settings–>Video–>HDR except HDR being turned On.

You will be entering Peak and Paper White Luminance values in Shader Parameters instead.

The only time you’re using the Peak and Paper White Luminance or Contrast values in the Settings–>Video–>HDR menu is when you’re dealing with non-HDR shaders or using an HDR preset in non-HDR mode.

This is probably because Mega Bezel uses an older version of the Sony Megatron shader. You can use the preset example I posted in the Mega Bezel thread as a starting point.

I have no idea. With no visual cues or aides I’m even more at a loss as to what’s going on.

My advice, use my Mega Bezel Preset Pack or Duimon’s Mega Bezel Preset Pack with SDR to HDR conversion tips.

Or, use the Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Preset I posted or just the stock base preset, load your graphics and start over from there.

Mega Bezel gives you the power to adjust these things and Duimon has several options at different screen sizes/zoom levels to choose from in some of his presets.

I almost forgot to mention, I even provided a new 4K HDR folder in my latest Mega Bezel Preset Pack which takes all of the guess work out of converting SDR presets to HDR presets. That would also be a great starting point. For those you would setup your Peak and Paper White Luminance as well as Contrast in the Settings–»Video–»HDR menu.

Once you have those loaded, you can then try to get your background loaded.

The only thing is that your hardware may or may not be powerful enough for those presets without some modification of the base presets.

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Honestly it didn’t take me that long so no big deal and I was mostly fiddling with the Mega Bezel stuff again to try to better understand what it was you were suggesting I try, which clearly I still failed to grasp. It was really just replacing a few relative paths and copy/pasting parameters from one preset to another. I backed up all the default folders before trying anything too so it’s quickly and easily reversed as well.

I spent a lot more time trying to chase down a weird bug in Windows that was disabling HDR entirely, but that’s a completely different story. Turns out it was actually a bug in my TCL TV that only took like two seconds to fix once I finally diagnosed the cause.

Frankly I think I’m back to what I was trying to say a few days ago. I already had a couple of the Cyberlab Megatron 4k HDR presets dialed in to a place I’m already happy with and had my sights on customizing them for each core/console. The only issue left was the effect HDR had on the basic overlay bezels I’m trying to use at the same time which was why I came here. The only reason I mentioned trying Mega Bezel was because I was curious how those shaders and bezels compared to what I started with, but I’d already abandoned that idea after it looked like it would take too much work to bend those default configurations to what I needed.

I thought your previous post was suggesting ways to either migrate or approximate those same settings inside Duimon’s Mega Bezel environment in order to gain better control over the bezel’s display settings since that was really the only problem I had left to address. I was game to try since Duimon’s and OrionsAngel’s designs are so similar to each other (are they both based on the same initial art assets for each console?) that I had no strong preference of one over the other. Whichever bezel collection was easier to configure and extend across Retroarch would be fine by me.

Since that wasn’t what you were suggesting and I still don’t understand how switching from the standalone Cyberlab presets to the Mega Bezel / Duimon presets would help me, I’m just planning to stick with the Cyberlab settings I’ve already found and taking your earlier advice to just toss OrionsAngel’s overlay PNGs into an image editor and see what a few quick brightness/gamma adjustments will get me.

The way I see it, I could try going back to the SDR to HDR conversion settings for Mega Bezel using the links you helpfully tracked down for me earlier, but then I’d have to do the basic configuration of the shader all over again, figure out how to expand the size of the game screen inside the bezel (all of the alternate bezel presets made the game smaller than the default, not larger), and possibly diagnose the weird flickering/shimmering effect if it’s still present under the new settings. And even then, there’s no guarantee I would like the shader results as well as the Cyberlab Megatron presets I’ve already configured. All of which is to say that it still sounds like switching to Duimon’s bezels would be more work than editing a handful of PNGs, not less, which is what I had already assumed a few days ago.

This is the part I’m still not clear on. How would either of these methods be functionally different from loading the same bezels as Retroarch overlays? Will loading them as part of the shader instead prevent them from being distorted by the HDR settings? Or will one of these methods allow me to compensate for the distortion some other way? Otherwise I’m not sure how they would be any easier or better than editing the PNGs manually.

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They will load automatically when you load the shader preset.

You will be able to use all of Mega Bezel’s resizing, lighting, colouring and other on the fly, real-time graphics editing functions, as well as apply reflections to the bezel/background overlay you’re using.

You would be able to very easily compensate for the brightening caused by HDR with 2 simple parameters which you can include in your shader preset.

HSM_GLOBAL_GRAPHICS_BRIGHTNESS = "40.000000"
HSM_STATIC_LAYERS_GAMMA = "0.620000"

You wouldn’t have to interfere with the actual PNG files at all using the Mega Bezel Method.

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Alright, I reset everything back to defaults in Mega Bezel, found the largest bezel available, removed the reflections that were still overloading my GPU (commented out the default base shader in LITE_Bezel1.slangp to use MBZ__4__STD-NO-REFLECT__GDV-MINI-NTSC.slangp instead), and added back what I believe are the relevant parameters. HDR is still turned on in Retroarch with my peak and paper white luminance values from earlier, contrast is still untouched.

#reference "Mega_Bezel_Packs/Duimon-Mega-Bezel/Presets/Lite/Nintendo_SNES/SNES-[STD]-[Guest-Mini]-[Custom-Bezel_001].slangp"
HSM_GLOBAL_GRAPHICS_BRIGHTNESS = "40.000000"
HSM_STATIC_LAYERS_GAMMA = "0.620000"
HSM_CURVATURE_MODE = "0.000000"

post_br = "1.000000"

g_sat = "0.000000"
gamma_c = "1.300000"
mask_layout = "0.000000"

PR = "0.000000"
PG = "0.000000"
PB = "0.000000"
AS = "0.000000"
sat = "0.000000"
  1. Bezel brightness and coloring looks fine now
  2. Curvature effect was too dramatic for my taste so I turned it off (not sure if there’s a way to easily keep the curvature but tone it down)
  3. Colors of the game are still too bright and saturated, not sure which controls to adjust for that but I haven’t spent any time trying to adjust anything yet.
  4. Flickering effect is still present. I tried again to capture it on camera but it’s still hard to see. As Mario walks around, most of the environment scrolls by smoothly except the rough edges where the dirt path meets the grass. It’s subtle and looks to be very situational, but the flickering/shimmering is hard to ignore once you see it.

https://imgur.com/a/qAFtCKf

Again, only took me a few minutes to get this far and I can see how copying the final version of the code above into the user params files would apply them across all of the Duimon presets at once. But honestly the flickering is distracting enough to me to eliminate Mega Bezel as an option if it can’t be diagnosed and fixed. The higher overhead of these presets is still a bit much for my hardware as well, even with reflections disabled. There’s a significant delay when trying to save/load any of these presets and it made Retroarch freeze entirely on me twice today.

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Great! I’m glad you’re making progress!

Yes, you can adjust the curvature amount and even leave the game screen (viewport) flat with the bezel curved. Curvature is pretty performance intensive though and so is noise.

Cropping and stretching as well based on my observations.

I did say that my tips only applied to my preset pack so it’s possible that you might need to tweak your Paper White Luminance and Contrast.

Besides that you can adjust Gamma and Saturation but GDV-Mini is a completely different beast from GDV so parameters behave differently.

I do have a couple presets based on that in my MBZ__5__POTATO_NO_REFLECTIONS folder but do remember that my settings have only been validated for Mega Bezel v1.14.0.

I have no idea. Do you have any composite video filters enabled? In order to capture you might have to use Manual/Pro mode on your camera and select 1/60 shutter speed. Or record at 60fps. If your camera has a slow motion option it might capture at 60fps or 120fps which might work.

Other than that you can use capture software and capture at 60fps with HDR disabled.

Or you could have adjusted the size of the Viewport and bezel by increasing the “Non-Integer Scale %” or if you’re using Integer Scale, “Integer Scale Offset”.

Or you could have just used a No_Reflections or No_Reflect base preset.

I suggest you try again using a Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor base preset. You might get better performance with that as well as better quality, the darkness is something that can be easily worked around by just adjusting the Gamma to suite.

I’ll provide the link to my SNES preset I made which you can use as a starting point.

With that preset you won’t have to use my SDR to HDR conversion tips since the extra brightness due to HDR has already been accounted for in that base preset.

Depending on the performance you’re getting you might want to switch to a lower performance tier Mega Bezel Sony Megatron Base Preset.

You just have to replace the first line in my preset with the filename of the new base preset.

As you can see, not many settings have been changed from the base preset so it should be pretty easy to get to something that works and looks good.

Just remember that these settings are for my display so you would have to adjust them to suite your setup.

In case you didn’t realize already, they correspond to the Peak Luminance, Paper White Luminance and Display’s Subpixel layout shader parameters.

Those are settings for 2 presets by the way. The suggested filenames are above the parameters in bold.

By the way this is another shader which includes a reflective bezel but is extremely lightweight even with reflections enabled and you can load your own backgrounds as well…and guess what? Duimon even has an overlay pack for those as well!

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So now I’ve got MBZ__4__STD-NO-REFLECT__MEGATRON-NTSC.slangp injected into Mega Bezel again, but using these parameters you linked above.

// Darkens bezel to better match brightness of the game
HSM_GLOBAL_GRAPHICS_BRIGHTNESS = "62.000000"
HSM_STATIC_LAYERS_GAMMA = "0.560000"

// Larger game/frame while preserving integer scaling
HSM_INT_SCALE_MULTIPLE_OFFSET = "1.000000"

// Couldn't find these within Retroarch and not sure what they do exactly, copy/pasted from example
HSM_CORE_RES_SAMPLING_MULT_SCANLINE_DIR = "100.000000"
HSM_SCALEFX_ON = "0.000000"

// Turn on HDR, settings customized for my display
hcrt_hdr = "1.000000"
hcrt_colour_accurate = "0.000000"
hcrt_max_nits = "840.000000"
hcrt_paper_white_nits = "500.000000"
hcrt_lcd_subpixel = "2.000000"

// CRT's display settings
hcrt_crt_resolution = "0.000000"
hcrt_saturation = "0.260000"

Like I mentioned in my comments, I couldn’t find whatever parameters HSM_CORE_RES_SAMPLING_MULT_SCANLINE_DIR and HSM_SCALEFX_ON refer to in Retroarch or what they’re supposed to do exactly, so I just copy-pasted them into the new preset I have saved.

This gives me a pretty good looking baseline, very similar to what the standalone Cyberlab Megatron preset looked like. The brightness could be boosted a bit, but I’m sure that’s an easy fix. I discovered a while ago that changing the CRT’s resolution goes a long way towards brightening the image. The colors, CRT texture, and performance are all really good, no complaints there.

That just leaves the weird flickering.

My phone’s camera still can’t capture it, even in slow-mo or 60fps. I installed OBS to do screen capture instead and I can definitely see it in the recording on my end. Imgur compresses it to the point of being invisible again, so I uploaded it to OneDrive instead.

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!ADwKCrjXX8Q26mU&id=CDF895E44B80A11F!16350&cid=CDF895E44B80A11F&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp

It’s only visible where the brown dirt path meets the green grass as the environment scrolls across the screen. I also noticed while trying a few of the other presets recently that the files labelled ADV Smooth seems to fix it, but the performance hit from those presets are still too much for my PC.

Also I realize the framerate’s crawling in this video, but that’s just because OBS is running at the same time.

Thanks, I hadn’t heard of these before. I tried Duimon’s bezels for these briefly just now and while it’s a lot more performant than the Mega Bezel reflections, I still wasn’t too happy with it unfortunately. The simpler reflection effect here looks too artificial for my taste. Other than that it looks pretty much the same to me as the non-Megatron shaders in Mega Bezel, so I don’t see what advantage switching to Koko-aio would give me.

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Increase Paper White Luminance and/or decrease Gamma.

This is good to hear!

Hmmm…this is unfortunate. Maybe you can report this to @HyperspaceMadness and he might better be able to understand what might be causing that.

When capturing subpixel accurate CRT shader presets it’s imperative to not allow any chroma compression. So you have to capture in RGB 4:4:4 Full or it’s HDR equivalent. Nvidia’s ShadowPlay does this well. You can even use Handbrake to shrink the resultant videos down considerably. I suppose that AMD would have an equivalent. Their capture software is called ReLive.

You can also use OBS but you have to use the correct colour format for this special use case.

Also, it might be better or just easier for capturing and sharing purposes to switch the shader to SDR mode before capturing because it doesn’t seem to have been captured using the proper colour format or specs for HDR to be triggered automatically by the playback software.

I was able to barely make out what you were describing though.

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At last some proper CRT photos using appropriate ISO, so as not to overexpose the phosphors on the bright colours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/8ApTuc8QXZ

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Have you seen this?

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JVC-D Series again! Good quality pics of these always resonate with me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/crtgaming/s/P8T0ZcPAmm

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CyberLab Megatron NX W420M 4K SDR Game Arcade Shadow Mask Ultra Smooth Ultimate CAR7x8x Advanced.slangp

Zoom in or download then zoom in and be sure to brighten your screen!

Desktop users, right click then open in a new tab then zoom in until things look right.

They should also look perfect if you zoom out until they match the integer scale specified in the filename.

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Hello Cyber, i have a little problem and I have not the answer, i want use the Wii Slot Mask ADV on the console preset with windowcast but when i use this preset retroarch freeze i dont know for what, i want use this preset for PS2 game but it work with Swanstation (for exemple) but not with the windowcast core… However I have a good PC (RTX 3080, I5 13600k, 32 Gb RAM) I will appreciate your help if you have the response at this issue

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Only 10GB VRAM though, that could be an issue for Smooth ADV Presets plus core upscaling. You could be running out of resources.

Posting a log using Pastebin might help get to the bottom of this.

You can try other presets, for example my Neo-GX presets or my presets in the MBZ__2__PERFORMANCE_NO_REFLECTIONS or MBZ__3__STANDARD_FULL_REFLECTIONS folder and see if the same thing occurs.