I demonstrate that small changes in user tint lead to greater changes in certain colors on the Famicom/NES, and conclude that most ‘accuracy’ focused palettes are probably good enough.
I also noticed, at least according to my analysis, that PAL’s colors are different in such a way to make the SMB sky blue, and there are many European and South American users in emulator forums and so now I wonder how many people arguing over palettes were doing so from that perspective.
Palettes were (and maybe still are) also a hot topic in the C64 scene for years, the computer being popular both in NTSC and PAL regions, but newer, including emulator developments, pretty one-sided from PAL lands.
E.g. the supposedly accurate Pepto palette was regarded as somewhat dull, but you were supposed to use it with saturation, CRT emulation of Vice activated, whatever. It also got a NTSC specific variant (I think this was based on a Sony decoder).
Unfortunately it turned out Pepto was wrong with his measurements and the palette has been superseded by Colodore. Colodore was still regarded as imperfect, and so the (imho somewhat unfortunately named) PALette appeared. The “Community Colors” palette was another effort where a bunch of people got together with their real machines to develop something, afaik another PAL-only project.
Thanks! I’ll try that out. You also said that there are other presents for transparencies, but they’re 4k presets and I have a 1440p monitor. Would I just have to change the mask size?
It’s a 1440p LCD. The ASUS pulsar monitor which has a fantastic 60hz strobing mode.
Tell me you didn’t read any of the readme.txt files nor the first post of this thread without saying it.
For most of my preset packs and presets after a certain point, blending of transparency and dithering effects is the default behaviour for consoles which require that.
While my Mega Bezel preset pack contains 1440p_Optimized preset folders, other preset packs include tips for adjusting the TVL or resolution settings to maintain consistency with the 4K Optimized Presets.
The parameters to change depend on the preset pack/Shaders used.
In general if you want a 4K preset to look similar at 1440p and similarly 1080p, you would have to adjust whichever parameters are necessary to increase the TVL.
Feel free to let me know which preset pack(s) Shaders you’re using and I can point you in the right direction.
As for which presets blend and don’t blend, the signal type in the description is also a good indicator.
So, look for RF, Composite or 3D Comb Filter and I also have presets which suggest you combine with a Blargg NTSC Video Filter Preset. The same applies. In some cases an S-Video preset might do some limited blending.
That’s probably not the reason my preset packs require an older version of Mega Bezel Reflection Shader. Mega Bezel integrates a collection of independent shaders with separate development and update cycles.
When a preset is made to a particular specification, then the underlying shader changes in the future via updates, the preset might very well stop looking as intended by the author. So what ends up happening sometimes is that there are unsolicited changes to the look of a preset or in some cases many presets.
Many times the work that must be done to update the presets involves hunting down new values to parameters which might look closest to what was already satisfactory.
Now multiply the verification process by thousands of presets and you can see how maintenance can quickly become an issue.
Hello, i read a lot of things in this thread and i would like to avoid to ask the same things, maybe already requested to the author of these presets. I’m testing a lot of stuff present here, so thanks for all this effort put on retrogaming and crt nostalgia.
I own a 48" LG OLED C5 so i would be oriented to take the advange of HDR technology with 4K resolution. I repeat, that i’m testing everything but i would like to be sure to use the “best” presets for my arrangement. Furthermore, maybe people already requested this, but on LG C5 for example i think that i need to turn off all the features that could interfere with Retroarch and shaders output
Is there a list of functionality to set on LG OLED TV in order to get the best output for CRT retrogaming experience ?
Very good! I hope you made extensive use of the Search function and read the readme.txt files as well and at least read the entire 1st post and downloaded and watched all the videos there too.
These are the setting I probably last used on my 2016 LG OLED TV which did eventually get burn-in related to making and using all of these HDR CRT-Shader Presets so do take that into consideration and be do this at your own risk. There are folks who say, newer LG OLED TVs won’t suffer burn-in e.t.c. well you never know until it’s too late.
Newer TVs and different model TVs are going to have different features and characteristics. Without me testing a particular model, there’s no way I can say what works best on that model.
On my modern miniLED TV, I experimented with different tonemapping and HDR Brightness settings before settling with the ones I currently use.
For 4K LG OLED TVs before the G5, and other tandem OLED sets, you should set the Display’s Subpixel Layout to RWBG/WOLED in Sony Megatron and Mask Layout 1 (BGR) in CRT-Guest-Advanced based Presets, including my Mega Bezel Presets.
Other than that, you can browse here or the Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor theread for some more tips on setting up things like Peak Luminance and Paper White Luminance and what others use in their OLED TVs.
If you allow this to be a two way thing by taking and sharing photos of the screen using different settings and presets, that would help immensely.
There are many presets which I like, so there is no best for me, just what I’m in the mood for at the time.
Posts in the various threads which show preset or preset pack names might be a good place to start to see what’s best for you.
Don’t stop reading/browsing this thread though. There’s a lot of useful information contained in here.
Some good preset families to start with are my “Near Field” presets, “Wx”, “Epic”, “4K HDR Ready” and “Neo-GX_Ultra” presets, “IV_OLED 1P2RTA” and “2P2RTA”, “CyberLab Special Edition” presets.
Am i wrong or in all 4k HDR preset there is BFI? The presence of BFI request to have 100hz 120hz and more right?
Since i use freesync with emulation arcade but in general also for console switching between pal and ntsc game, i think that BFI is not the right choice.
There isn’t BFI in any of my presets so far. The terms “4K HDR Game BFI” that you might see are notes about the TV modes and settings in use while the preset was being made, which can be very helpful since display settings can significantly affect the way the preset looks, even on the same display it was originally designed on.
BFI indicates that BFI might have been in use when the preset was developed which would indicate that that there could be some sort of effort made to compensate for the reduction in brightness at least in the foundational stages of the presets development. This BFI in my case would mostly have been hardware BFI provided by the display itself.
My most recent PVM Edition presets are focused on brightness and are probably be some of the brightest presets I have made for Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor.
I got a Samsung Odyssey G7 70F IPS monitor with 4K and HDR10 and gave the Megatron NX Death to Pixel HDR a try. Also downgraded Guest shader as per instructions.
I have the monitor connected via HDMI 2.1 cable as it is better suited for 10bit than DP 1.4.
HDR is enabled on Windows and calibrated via Windows HDR Calibration utility.
One important question:
Retroarch HDR option should be untouched and left to default off?
Picture looks like this.
Used ProShot photo application on mobile (ISO 50 and Shutter 1/8) for photo to look closer to actual monitor output.
Presets used are Genesis Composite, NES N64 Fine Ultra and default Arcade.
On NES I had to change the core from Mesen to Nestopia as it was way too dark.
I guess I can dabble with the countless parameters to yield results closer to my liking
The only CyberLab Megatron preset pack that requires downgrading is the first one I made since the presets look for the Guest shader in its default location.
Subsequent CyberLab Megatron preset packs use specific versions of CRT-Guest-Advanced but they’re placed in non-default folders to avoid anything being overwritten and to avoid having to overwrite (downgrade) the default Guest-Advanced version from the Online Updater.
From my W420M preset pack onwards all required Guest-Advanced versions are included so there’s no need to manually fetch and install the correct version in the correct folder.
It will be installed with the preset pack.
Not too shabby but you generally want to lock your Shutter speed to 1/60 or 1/30 for these things. You can then adjust your ISO and distance from the screen depending on how much detail you want to capture without blowing things out with overexposure.
Or you can just use newer preset packs like my latest Epic MiniLED preset pack. So instead of going through countless parameters, you can go through countless presets instead.
Actually the Epic preset pack is an attempt at streamlining some of my best Sony Megatron work into a smaller more manageable pack with a superior and very useful Shader Stack. In some cases you will find some gems in the previous packs as well but I suggest you start with the latest pack and work your way backwards instead.
miniLED doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use the preset pack on a non miniLED display.
This shouldn’t be a complaint with these preset packs as part of the setup instructions require you to adjust the Peak and Paper White Luminance according to your display and as a result, brightness can be as high as your display can deliver.
There’s no reason why Mesen’s output should be darker than Nestopia’s unless you’re using different Palettes.
I’ve used the Sony CXA2025AS palette exclusively when tweaking my presets.
In my experience Nestopia adds 1 extra frame of lag vs Mesen, which is why I switched to Mesen.
So use the Peak and Paper White Luminance until you get things bright enough without overblowng brights. These settings are not absolute and even if RTINGS or your specs say that your Peak Luminance is a particular number, always judge with your eyes. If too dark increase Peak and Paper White Luminance. If overblown or clipped, decrease.
The only other setting you should have to adjust is the “Display’s Subpixel Layout” which should be set to RGB for your IPS display with an RGB subpixel layout.
And yes, you have to do these adjustments for every preset you use.
A quick Google search reveals that this display has a Peak Brightness (Luminance of about 400 to 600 Nits) in HDR mode with actual test results showing it closer to 500 Nits in practical use.
Key Brightness & Display Features (G70F/IPS):
Typical Brightness (SDR): ~350-400 nits.
Peak Brightness (HDR): ~400-600 nits (advertised up to 600, actual testing on some units shows closer to 400-500 in practical use).
The Samsung Odyssey G7 70F (27-inch IPS, LS27FG706ENXZA) features a typical SDR brightness of 350 cd/m² (minimum 280 cd/m²). For HDR content, it is designed to meet DisplayHDR 600 standards, capable of reaching peak brightness levels around 600–640 nits, though some users have reported lower, varying peak results in real-world testing.
This is what the creator of the Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor had to say about display brightness requirements:
That was a long time ago. In more recent times he has said this:
This is another great read concerning brightness requirements for accurate CRT emulation:
Mr Tandem RGB WOLED, you never followed up on this:
Don’t you want proper tandem OLED Support to arrive in CRT Shaders?
All we wouldd need is your attention for about a day or two and your willingness to do a few back and forth tests and report back with photos. Nothing too difficult.
You didn’t give me any feedback on what I posted other than more instructions.
So RGB Interpolated Mask, I’ve since moved on to Mask 0 at 1.0 strength, Size 2, Layout BGR; on RGB I was seeing that some colors would lack TVLs.
Is Guest going to incorporate any of this work?
I keep wanting to request some 480p SDR non BFI Dreamcast shaders from you via Guest Advanced NTSC, but it seems you only want to work in Megatron land, and, to each their own.
Your attention to detail surpasses mine and what I am capable of despite dumping 1000ish hours into.
