I tried the presets and to be honest guest’s shader isn’t my cup of tea.
I am sure, that it depends on the settings, but I realized that I don’t need NTSC blurs etc.
A tiny bit of blooming maybe, but there are Reshade standalone shaders for these kind of effects.
Megatron with its masks is already good enough to my eyes and therefore I am happy now as it is.
I also realized if I fiddle around more, my obsession of optimizing will never go away and I will not play games, which should normally be the main reson for using shaders
When I have some time, I will open a new thread, but at the moment it seems quiet here and not many people are reading as it seems, which is fully understandable in the summer time.
Estou sempre aqui lendo e aprendendo e usando todos os shaders que os artistas aqui disponibilizam.
Ontem mesmo estava jogando Sega Rally do Sega Saturnocom os Shaders do Cyber.
Ou MK Arcade com shader do Cyber.
Ja nem fico mais comparando com crt real, apenas fico curtindo todas atualizações.
Só não uso esses shaders com Hdr com medo de queimar ou marcar a Lg Oled C1.
What I would say is that these quick and dirty presets I shared looked a bit distinct from any other I’ve tried before using CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC. I’m not sure if it was because of some new features or if it was because I had to run my display at 30Hz in order to get 4K RGB 4:4:4 Full colour but I was noticing some type of interlacing effect that I never experienced before.
I also noticed a difference in the scanline behaviour on high res scenes. They automatically disappeared and I didn’t see a setting to disable that behaviour. This wasn’t the behaviour with the last version I was familiar with.
Lastly, I don’t understand why the Mask Stagger feature seems to have been removed in place of much less flexable “Convert to ShadowMask” toggle feature, which seems to only provide 2 stagger patterns.
I know that my Shadow Mask presets were a bit unique around these parts in the exact pattern that they used and I realize that if my Mega Bezel Shadow Mask presets are loaded in newer version of Mega Bezel (and CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC), they won’t look anywhere near as they should without some adjustment.
I trust that overall the changes and updates to CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC are all for the better but when someone like me highly tweaks the settings in order to get the look I want then the effects of all the knobs change it can be a bit daunting.
No problem, I can understand that. I had just hoped to be able to get the look you achieved to the final point of nirvana by added that Magic Glow and Base Mask feature which might have made it almost verbatim to the CRT example photo you posted with the green text.
It wasn’t really about changing anything else about your shader but it has opened my mind about what might actually be possible with just a couple more features, or even just the Base Mask feature alone.
@MajorPainTheCactus seems to be a bit over the development of Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor plus it has very strict performance requirements goals so I don’t have any hope for the Base Mask feature to be added to the shader anytime soon.
It’s okay man, you enjoy your games. Don’t do like me and spend more time tweaking then when it’s time to play, your OLED TV stops working and you never enjoy what you spend all this time making.
Maybe it would be cool to have a fork of Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor with CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC features, plus Liliuim SDR to HDR Tone Mapping, plus those Reshade horizontal blurs built-in.
One can only dream, right.
I can’t even try out your stuff at the moment until I repair or replace my TV.
I’m always here reading and learning and using all the shaders that the artists make available here. Just yesterday I was playing Sega Rally on the Sega Saturno with Cyber Shaders. Or MK Arcade with Cyber shader. I no longer compare it to real crt, I just enjoy all the updates. I just don’t use these shaders with Hdr for fear of burning or marking the LG Oled C1.
Well thanks for sharing this because it feels good to know that I’m sharing an experience that evokes such joy and others can have a similar experience.
I was a bit skeptical at first when I started using HDR Presets, with my OLED light on 100 so it’s understandable that you’d be a bit cautious.
The problem is that the better these preset and shaders looked, the more I wanted to play or just admire these older games and so the less I mixed my content but once you go HDR just like once you go OLED, it’s hard to go back.
@HunterK has a solution to help with reduce the risk of scanlines burning in though but someone smarter than I needs to code it into Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor.
I would suggest, that you get a new TV in the future. Minimum LG CX or GX series. I have seen these used for around 500,- euros for a 55 inch model here in germany. With Lilium’s inverse tm and dynamic tonemapping of the LG it is bright enough with the shaders and full masks.
I think the 55 inch G3 with MLA will be available new for around 1000 euros soon when there are sales, as they have become more cheap since the release of the G4 series. These will have even headroom for BFI, if someone has problems with “motion blur”.
It’s really an effect of CRT technology and the signals, some effects work even with RGB. Hardware bilinear filtering came later. I think the N64 may have been the first that used some sort of hardware filtering.
I like the cyberlab megatron shaders but is it possible to get bezels with refelections for those ones, I looked under MBZ__0__Smooth-Advance_Full_Reflections but I can’t see any megatron ones.
What I share is what I use so I started off using Mega Bezel, then I tried CRT-Royale then finally understood what I needed to in order to use Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor and once you go HDR you can’t go back.
The thing is, Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor isn’t required for HDR so you can achieve some really good looks by using my older presets, including ones with the bezels and enabling HDR in RetroArch itself.
Things are going to look a bit overblown though since those presets were never designed with HDR in mind but you can tweak a few settings to make things more palatable.
I’ve listed a few tips not too long ago in this thread.
So we can have the best of both worlds without Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor.
You’ll probably never be able to get the exact look as my Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor presets using Mega Bezel, even with the Mega Bezel Megatron Base presets due to differences in the shader chains between the Mega Bezel and my Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor Presets.
In addition to that, the Bezel robs the shader of precious vertical resolution so again they won’t look the same because of that.
At this time, I have no intention of making an entire line of Mega Bezel presets using the integrated Megatron Base Preset.
So it might be best to focus on trying to use the built-in RetroArch HDR or Windows’ AutoHDR in order to exploit and apply additional HDR brightness to existing SDR designed presets.
With that said, I did make a quick and dirty Mega Bezel Preset using the Megatron Base Preset which I posted in the Mega Bezel thread some months ago.
I also have some internal customized presets based on my Mega Bezel Presets which I modified for use with the built-in HDR setting in RetroArch.
Not sure if they’ll ever see the light of day in a release however but I’ll definitely try to post what I’ve learned from the process. So I’ll direct you to that link.
There have been other users who have been doing the AutoHDR or built-in HDR combination with my presets for quite some time now.
What you can also do is try to take some of the parameters from my Megatron presets and plug them into the Mega Bezel Megatron Base Preset and see what happens.
People have mixed experiences when using my presets. Part of the reason for this is that I used to sit at optimal viewing distance from a 55" TV when designing my presets. This would have affected my perspective of the image significantly.
Not too long ago, I changed my viewing setup and am now a bit closer to the screen. I find my regular presets needed some adjustments in a few areas in order to look the way I wanted at this nearer viewing distance.
Just a lil sneak peak at what I’ve been working on since I’m now using a non-HDR TV that can only do YCbCr 4:2:0. You really don’t need a fancy TV or display to enjoy Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor (+passes from CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC+SuperXBR+Grade).
I call this one:
CyberLab Megatron NX W420M 4K SDR Game Turbo Duo Composite Shadow Mask Smooth Ultra Balanced.slangp
@hunterk I would like to use some of the features of your magnanimous img-mod.slang shader, however I seem to be having trouble identifying which parts of code go along with which of the include lines I’ve commented out.
Can you assist me in getting it to do what I would like?
Could it be potentially failing as sections are completely commented out now? (Like the black level, curvature and contrast for example)
A log would be great, tho they’re not always helpful (I got an unknown semantics error the other day when doing some shader work and just went yep that’s broke )
It gave an error because I hadn’t updated my path to point to my modded version in the “…/misc/shaders…” subfolder and for some reason my modded img_mod_mod.slang was in the “…/misc” subfolder instead of the “…/misc/shaders…” subfolder.
I haven’t actually tested it since updating the paths and copying the file to the correct folder.
I still feel like I was trying hard to guess which sections of code correspond to the various include sections though. Perhaps some labels, numbering or other referencing can be applied to better identify which section begins where and ends where and which matches which?
If anything it could be an evolution to the current shaders.
Also, how is this intended to be used or shared? Am I supposed to supply my modded version with my preset pack?
The sections actually seem a little clearer viewing them on Pastebin vs Windows Notepad with word wrap enabled. So that was another part of my problem.
Thanks for the great work though! This is a really great all encompassing shader that is hiding behind the scenes. It probably needs a @RetroCrisis video!
Sure, or you could strip it down to just the few things you need and/or change the include paths to look in one of the directories you distribute. The img_mod shader itself was intended to be a sort of manual/template for how to use the various included files.
As for using it to make a CRT shader, yeah, that’s doable. I already put the mask code in there, so you just need to replace the basic sampling step with a function that draws some nice scanlines.
)