CRT screens don’t have pixels. The number of phosphors on a CRT is fixed, yet CRT screens can display multiple resolutions.
What would work to have the phosphor triads be better aligned with the pixels in graphics is to use a higher TVL CRT Mask.
I don’t think a CRT projects an image onto the mask in a similar manner to how most CRT Shaders scale an image and handle things like OverScan and aspect ratio.
Integer scale tends to provide better looking scanlines and lowers the chance of and occurance of moire patterns.
I really can’t say.
If it’s a non-Integer Scale it can definitely mess with the scanlines.
@1112e I hope my response was worthy enough for your question. I think this is an important yet often overlooked or should I say slightly under appreciated aspect of CRT emulation that probably deserves its own thread.
I think the best way to go about this would be to have a real representative CRT to use for comparison but even something like this can provide skewed results due to geometry adjustments. The reason I say this is because who is to say that every game on every console is supposed to have perfect circles everywhere or would have when viewed on original hardware and a CRT?
This topic is extremely important for correct rendering of things like power bars in many Super Nintendo games, for example Super Double Dragon, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and the Pow meter in Samurai Showdown.
It’s important to get it right for the audio channel level indicators in the sound test menu of Ninja Spirit for TurboGrafx-16.
Also, many arcade games, for example several Neo Geo Fighting Games as well as several Mortal Kombat sequels have some transparency effects that get messed up if the scaling/aspect ratio is even slightly off.
So do keep up what you’re doing but perhaps this question should be posed to a wider audience who might have much more knowledge of the topic than myself. Remember I don’t even make Shaders, I make presets for shaders. There’s a vast difference.
Next thing I would add is do some research and take a look at @Nesguy’s CRT Shader Presets, they probably never end up outside the pixel boundaries but like I mentioned before, that’s probably due to the higher TVL that he uses.
If you’re on a 1440p screen, one easy way to access higher TVL presets is to use my 1080p Optimized Presets.
Also, in my CRT Royale Preset Pack this is something that I kinda focused on to try to avoid so you should see things being better aligned in that pack. I don’t have any 1440p specific presets in that pack but you can try the 1080p ones or you can also try the 4K ones and just adjust the Desired Triad Size until they look good to you on your 1440p screen.
You can also give Hyllian’s Shader Preset Pack a try.
But to reiterate what I said earlier there’s a big difference between what happens on a real CRT when it comes to aspect ratio than when you’re using Mega Bezel for example and you start cropping Overscan because CRT+Real hardware accurate Overscan and aspect ratio is just not built-in to the front end, shaders or emulator cores as yet.
If it is, I don’t know how to set it up. Some say, just use Core Provided, Some say just set it to 4:3. If using Mega Bezel you’re supposed to set it to Full in the RetroArch Video Scaling menu so that it can be handled by and adjusted via the Mega Bezel Shader Parameters.
I don’t think that gives proper aspect ratios all the time if any at all though because there’s still a lot of video information that gets rendered on the viewport that would otherwise not be rendered on real hardware. So that would probably skew the aspect ratio and then if we decide to manually crop it off, it would skew the aspect ratio again.
The fact that we need per game cropping settings says that something is still missing. We never had to worry about that with CRTs and real hardware. We just plugged and we played. Whatever the result was in those scenarios would be the most accurate results and I think it’s a bit convoluted at the moment to achieve something that should be so simple.
Lastly, just adding this here because I don’t want it lost but I do remember a user who posted that they weren’t satisfied with the aspect ratio they were getting by default on Mega Bezel in SNES games if I recall correctly. They came up with a custom aspect ratio that worked better and was more accurate to them.
Up to now, I can’t get the exact, accurate, correct, proper aspect ratio for Mortal Kombat arcade game sequels, Neo Geo Fighting Games and many more which go overlooked because there may not be as glaring issues.
If anyone knows feel free to direct me.
