This may not actually be entirely correct. 2 pixel masks are there for a reason and the science is solid on them and they do actually work. The post I shared has a good breakdown of how a Green-Magenta Mask would be rendered on a 1080p RGB display. The spacing between the individual subpixels would be even as the mask layout would be exploiting the black gap provided by the switched off subpixels across 2 adjacent pixels.
1 Like
You must be 20x as frustrated as I am about OLED subpixel structure. I tried commenting about it on one of Vincent’s YouTube videos (HDTVtest) and the Comment Monsters lit me up for daring to mention it in terms of CRT Shaders!
1 Like
Not really, just realizing that very few seem to understand or care about this stuff but it is important from a preservation and accuracy perspective. I guess some people are still so blinded by the novelty of true blacks and better viewing angles, the lack of blooming and the idea of super fast pixel response times providing better input lag and better motion clarity that they miss certain other important pillars of accurate CRT emulation.
At least my contribution to these things is well documented. However, I came up with the concept of the using a fast moving rolling scanline instead of BFI to improve motion clarity and I asked HunterK if he could make a shader to do just that and he did and I tested it out on my 60Hz LG OLED E6P and it didn’t get around the refresh rate limitation and seem to improve motion clarity much and was a strobing mess because the beam (rolling scanline) couldn’t run faster than the content refresh rate and even if it could my display was still limited to 60Hz.
Then came SubFrame support.
Then came odd cadence BFI to prevent Image retention in LCDs.
Then came CRT-Beam-Simulator with no mention of CyberLab’s early concept and HunterK’s proof of that concept and I can’t find that shader code nor that conversation I had with HunterK which led to it.
I can’t remember if it was via DM on these forums or in a thread here or over on Reddit. At least there’s one person with can vouch for me.
I’m more upset with myself that I can’t find my receipts for that than what’s going on in the world of OLED.
1 Like
Dunno, but folks can always try to adjust the TVL with the Mask Zoom parameter. Personally i got used to it and i also don’t like to sharp edges on phosphors with very low TVL. Mask Zoom sharpen is also a handy functionality, especially with 4k displays.
2 Likes
I’m still playing around with it, and need to spend more time with that 240p test suite, but for the Legendary presets I’ve set Retroarch to 2500. Similar for the miniLED but I haven’t spent as much time looking at them.
This thing that stands out the most to me is the map screen for LTTP starts to look a bit off to me higher than 2500, I think that’s where I start to see some clipped whites/highlights as there starts to be this kind of whitish haze over the screen.
I’ll need to keep playing with it a bit. I feel like I need to spend a little more time dialing in the settings and I’ll try to get some pictures when I think I have it how I like it to show you how it’s looking.
And I’m definitely interested in looking into Shader Beam, I’ve spent a lot of time with his ShaderGlass tool.
2 Likes
Remember the numbers don’t tell you when you’re hitting the limits of the capabilities of your display, only your eyes will.
Also, Paper White Luminance has a much more significant effect on overall brightness than Peak Luminance in the older Sony Megatron presets. Peak mainly affects the brightest of the bright and the whitest of the white, so don’t hesitate to increase your Paper Whilte Luminance to as high as it takes for the image to be as bright as it needs to be within the observed limits of your display.
Yeah when using the Sony Megatron based shaders I’ve just set the Peak Luminance to what my monitor is, it doesn’t really seem to do much of anything, and the Paper White Luminance I set similar to what I have the Retroarch HDR brightness at, and I get similar results to the guest based shaders. I just really like the one I’m using from your Legendary pack so I’m mostly sticking with that for now.
1 Like
I’m playing around with the Guest Legendary presets on an LG C4 42" OLED, this is not my first time installing them but I’ve never really gotten them to look right (to me). Big disclaimer, I barely played games on CRTs as a child (and only on PC), so it’s hard to know from memory how games should look like, so I check videos on youtube for some games to at least have some reference.
That being said, I want to ask if the defaults for “CyberLab Guest 4K HDR Game BFI SNES S-Video Shadow Mask Sharp Smooth Advanced CAR10x9x” should look like this, or if there’s something else going on with my settings that’s messing with the final image? Also uploading some pictures (not screenshots!) after playing with the mask type, strength, scanlines, glow, and bloom (colours still need work). I feel like the defaults just look too dark, black, blocky, with “pixels” that are too big, even sitting a few meters away from the screen
Huge thanks again @Cyber for your dedication and amazing work
1 Like
Download CyberLab_Guest_Legendary_Death_To_Pixels_4K_HDR_Shader_Preset_Pack_27-06-2026 and try some of the new Shadow Mask and Shadow Mask Fine, Shadow Mask Super Fine, Old Skool TV, Vintage Shadow Mask TV and BFI Vintage Old Skool CyberTron TV presets.
I realize you might have missed when I mentioned that “Sharp” presets are geared toward line art games and not games with a lot of shading and high colour counts.
In any case all of the presets with Sharp Smooth Advanced in their filenames can be easily adjusted to look smoother by setting Blending [No Blend|AA] to 1.
This is in the readme.txt Line 165:
Smooth Advanced presets have access to Anti-Aliasing/Smoothing. This can be enabled or disabled by toggling the No Blend/AA Shader Parameter.
Higher TVL presets would have finer mask features. Those would most likely have “Fine” in their filenames. Shadow Mask presets usually start off relatively fine by default so you may not see fine on most of those but that doesn’t mean that they’re coarse.
Those experimental SNES Shadow Mask presets which seemed to have caught your attention can be considered coarse but I don’t think I want to use that word to describe too many presets so I might find smething else. For me it was a wonderful learning experience in getting familiar with CRT-Guest-Advanced’s “new” way of creating Shadow Masks after really enjoying the old way in my CyberLab Neo-GX Preset Pack days.
I found some alignment issues at the TVL I was going for, which is what I might have used in my Megatron Shadow Mask Presets prior so I opted for the lower TVL as a start.
Only yesterday or the other day, Guest mentioned the Mask Zoom function and I have been playing around with it, only to realize that when I went down a notch using the Mask Zoom feature my Shadow Mask aligned better within the scanline so now finer Shadow Mask presets, which were my favourite to use in my Sony Megatron miniLED preset packs are now viable.
Another thing about those SNES S-Video Shadow Mask presets is that they were originally designed around CRT-Guest-Advanced’s new Bloom Pixel Sampling feature which smoothed, softened and blended the pixels a bit, however there were some artifacts being produced which made the feature untenable for my purposes so I disabled it, leaving all of my presets that had it enabled quit a bit sharper. Of course, I would have went into all of them and rebalanced things but there’s a vast difference in sharpness when Bloom Pixel Sampling is enabled and only that feature seems to look like that feature.
Concerning your brightness challenges, you can read over the readme.txt file and take a look at the following posts. There’s not much more for me to say or do about that.
If you still have brightness challenges, you can try my Mega Bezel 4K HDR Ready Presets but they’re currently broken and I’m working on fixing them.
In the meantime there are PVM/Pro Monitor Edition presets which are the opposite of blocky and have mask features that are so fine that they are essentially disabled in my previous miniLED Epic preset pack. You can try those as well.
Over at the Sony Megatron Thread is also a good place to find information about best HDR settings for LG WOLED Displays.
Again the correct Mask Layout for your display with my Legendary Preset Pack is BGR Mask Layout 1 and for my Sony Megatron based preset packs RWBG/WOLED. In some cases for example using Shadow Mask presets, the “wrong” layout might look better on your display so you can feel free to experiment and use whichever one looks best in a case like that.
You’re welcome
By the way, I forgot to ask, what do you have your Peak Luminance, Paper White Luminance and/or HDR Brightness Values set to?
2 Likes
Thank you, I’m having an easier time tuning the shadow mask super fine 27-06 preset and using the mask layout 1, I think my main issue were the scanlines. Also added a tiny amount of noise and rolling scanlines now
My HDR Brightness is set to 1400, I think it can go higher without clipping but that seems like a good value. I didn’t really have issues with the brightness in itself, just how the overall image looked, now with smoothing, smaller scanlines, and the correct mask layout+size, it’s looking plenty bright
1 Like
One thing you can do to make the scanlines look even better is to reduce the integer scale factors. Unfortunately for Shadow Mask and possibly also Slot Mask presets, if you lower this by 1 unit at a time, it might result in misalignment of the mask and scanlines. So for the SNES Shadow Mask presets which I currently recommend CAR10x9x you can try CAR8x7x and you should see a significant improvement in the overall look of the preset and the scanlines in particular. Of course the viewport will now be smaller but your display should also be able to hit higher brightness values at the smaller window sizes.
2 Likes
On a completely unrelated note, let’s pour one out for physical media:
3 Likes
PSA:
4K 120Hz 10-bit YCbCr422 is viable with Mask 6 Size 2 aka RRGGBB Mask.
1 Like
I can’t seem to get these to work. I downloaded the updated versions of the CRT guest shader files instead of the older version that you said you made them for. Is that my issue?
1 Like
Hi, have you read the installation instructions in the first post? Have you read the readme.txt file included in each shader preset pack you’ve tried? Have you watched any of the installation videos created by RetroCrisis which are in the first post of this thread?
What software environment/OS are you using?
Which preset pack or preset packs have you tried and are now referring to?
Can you provide some more details as to what installations you followed, where you copied the files and what messages you are getting after you tried to load a preset?
If you know how to share a log you can try whatever you did again (but after reading the first post, watching the videos and reading the readme.txt files) using pastebin.
Which presets have you tried specifically?
The presets packs after the W420M preset pack don’t require any additional external shaders, since they are self included.
You still need to update your Slang Shaders using the Online Updater.
Some more images from CyberLab Guest Legendary Death To Pixels 4K HDR Shader Preset Pack!
Photos of the LCD screen:
Screenshots:
Adaptive-Strobe 120Hz+ Presets Settings:
3 Likes
For anyone who still has a Geforce GTX 10 series GPU and would like to unleash the full potential of their GPU resolution, refresh rate and colour depth capabilities through the use of it’s Display Port 1.4a port. 4K 120Hz 8-bit RGB 4:4:4 Full is possible!!
Method 2 for even more pixel clock/bandwidth headroom!
To enable G-Sync on the TCL QMx51G, QMxK and QM7L Game Master must be Enabled on the HDMI Port which is connected to the PC Game Master is in the All Settings–>System Menu. HDMI Mode must be set to 2.1 and High Frame Rate Mode should be Enabled in the All Settings–>Channels and Inputs–>External Inputs Menu.
I get a black screen when I enable settings for the selected display model since trying the second method.
2 Likes
Have you done the Tyson dodge testing method to determine your latency? Are you able to dodge his uppercuts on reaction? During Rounds 2 and 3, he’ll do a pattern changeup and then throw an uppercut. That first uppercut after the changeup comes out 1 frame faster than his normal Round 1 uppercuts which should all be perfectly dodgeable on reaction anyway.
Round 2 after the changeup is 2 uppercuts. Round 3 after the changeup is 1 uppercut, then a waiting period followed by the 2 Jab --> Uppercut combo. (an easy opportunity to block both jabs and get two stars before dodging the uppercut)
You can get like 7 stars at the beginning of Round 2 because he opens with those jabs (obviously your Stars cap at 3).
Not yet. I’ve used the Auto Frame Delay + Preemptive Frames setup for a long time before exploring Sync To Content Refresh Rate + using RTSS limiter at 60fps.
That seemed to have been working well but now I’m in experimenation mode once again. So eventually I’ll settle on what works best. I like the idea of games running at their correct speed though.