Here are some increased resolution screenshots :
The image on Flycast looks sharper obviously, but it’s a bit too “blocky” I think. I must add that I disable interlacing. For PCSX2 I get weird big scanlines with interlacing disabled, but they disappear when I reenable it (see the 2 GT4 screenshots for comparison).
Well that might depend on the game and internal resolution you’re running. When I suggested to set it to 1 it was to actually expand the screen a bit as that helps with the quality of the scanlines. I’m new to 32-bit and beyond emulation so I would need some time to get familiar with the quirks. What I’ve noticed is that increased internal resolution results in vertical gaps in Ryu’s Super Hadoken in MVSC2. There always seems to be something wrong or at least not quite right somewhere if I change something to fix something else. In time I’ll post some updated presets just for Dreamcast/Naomi/Atomiswave and other higher resolution systems now that my 8-bit and 16-bit era stuff is more or less mature.
Another setting that makes a huge difference is the Opposite Dir Multiplier (Y Downsample for H Scanlines). Default is 100 but 75 and 50 really brings out the scanlines by reducing the number and making them thicker on those higher resolution consoles. The downside is that high res elements like text suffers as well as the scanlines looking not properly aligned depending on the combination of that setting and the internal resolution.
Lastly, I’ve been experimenting with HSM’s special DEREZ base preset because I’m not seeing the same results when I use the STD base preset.
Thanks again.
What method do you use to use my presets with Duimon’s overlays?
I know it’s not that difficult but I’m just curious as @Aeoliza was asking previously.
If you’re using an nVIDIA Graphics Card, you can probably press Alt-F1 to take a screenshot. Or look for the Dolphin screenshot hotkey in standalone dolphin and try it and see if it works in RetroArch.
Try 320 x 240 Internal resolution or anything higher than native. You should get better smoothing. You can also adjust the Opp Dir Multiplier to reduce the number of horizontal scanlines while making them thicker. That helps a lot with blockiness.
I just copy one of the presets, lets say “Dreamcast-[STD]-[Guest].slangp” for example, and I just replace the first line “#reference “:/shaders/shaders_slang/bezel/Mega_Bezel/Presets/Base_CRT_Presets/MBZ__2__STD__GDV.slangp”” with my custom Cyber preset.
There was no room(black areas) for cropping but since you gave me those cropping values, I just did what you told me to. The black areas are generally present in Mame games from what I’ve seen, but then the color bands happen. As I mentioned before and also shared screenshots, SF3 3rd strike for Dreamcast has black areas too for some odd reason which I cropped but I got the color bands issue. So I had to do both cropping and Int scaling thing on it.
Right now the only workaround seems to be setting Integer scaling the preset settings to 1. But it still remains to be seen if it will work on all games.
I will continue working on this. At 4K the same issue that was causing the pink horizontal lines at 1080p was showing up as bands of darker, uneven scanlines. I was able to eliminate this by adjusting the scanline parameters. Basically the more defined and separated the horizontal scanlines are the less likely to have those issues. That’s why lowering the resolution, changing the int. scale mode to 1, cropping the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen and lastly adjusting the scanlines parameters all had the effect of reducing or eliminating those anomalies.
It’s also easy to get less pixelation by lowering the Opp Dir Scanline Pre-Scale setting to 75% or 50%. 75% results in uneven scanline alignment which affects text quite a bit. 50% results in even scanline alignment but the text looks much lower resolution. At least it’s readable and not garbled like when you set internal resolution to 320 x 240. All of this is at 640 x 480 native internal resolution. At this resolution the Scale FX doesn’t really do much to the sprites so most of the smoothing is as a result of the scanlines and mask.
Once you use any resolution other than native the smoothing seems to look better. 1280 x 960 seems to be a good option however, the big issue that remains is once you leave native resolution Ryu’s Super Hadoken has vertical gaps in it.
So as it stands, it is possible to improve the look of things on the Flycast in high resolution games with pixel graphics and even in low res. games. I didn’t want to mention it until I got a fix because once you see something you can’t unsee it but I could see the pink lines in @Tromzy 's last set of screenshots. I think I even saw vertical pink lines. It shouldn’t be like that. I just didn’t want to mention it until I came up with a fix.
If I can’t find a better solution I’ll have to start with the solution that looks both sharp and smooth but leaves Ryu’s Super Hadoken messed up. I don’t think you should have to give up the nice high resolution elements just to get those sprites straightened out though.
Too bad scale FX wasn’t designed to work on hi res elements. I guess the best option might be some sort of SSAA effect.
By the way, I updated to RetroArch 1.9.13 and it seems to be slightly slower than 1.9.12. I also updated my installed cores and guess what? My Flycast core options still show the Cable Type. I think I might revert to 1.9.12 due to the performance regression though.
Whenever I try to increase the Internal Resolution in core options above 640x480, it crashes RA. It’s weird, no idea what’s causing this.
Maybe if you do a fresh installation then it won’t show, but Idk for sure.
It soft crashes for me sometimes when doing this. Especially if I use the Guide button on my controller to go back to the game. Try increasing the resolution one step at a time and maybe go back to the game using the menu instead of F1 or the Guide button.
Oh my bad I didn’t fully explain it. Actually increasing the internal resolution is fine but when I apply the shader, it hard crashes RA. I tried both F1 and Resume through the menu but it still crashes.
I can’t say why that’s happening. Perhaps you can try to retrace your steps to when it started happening.
If you list what happens in step by step fashion before the crash maybe I can assist. Or perhaps, @HyperspaceMadness or @Duimon might be able to assist with the help of a log.
There is info in the shader thread about this. It has to do with the ScaleFX pass that results in passing too much to the GPU for the buffer to handle.
If you make a copy of the base shader and change it’s reference shader to “MBZ__2__STD__HD-CORE__GDV.slangp” then change Cyber’s reference shader to your copy, it should stop crashing.
The next Mega Bezel version will eliminate the ScaleFX pass from the STD base preset.
By base shader do you mean “hsm-prep-add-params-standard.slang”? If so, I can’t see any reference shader in it.
Never mind. Actually the word “shader” confused me. Then I figured you meant Presets, lol.
Yeah I just saw what you’re talking about.
In Mame games though, everything just looks too blurry.
I’ve never tested my presets in Mame. They look excellent in FinalBurn Neo to me though. Perhaps those are things I can look at in the future.
By the way in celebration of 1000+ views of this thread, I added 5 new presets to my shader pack! I’ve dubbed them my PVM Edition in reference to the sharpness and clarity of the image and “signal” Feel free to download and take them for a spin. I’ll try to post some screenshots when I get a chance!
Hello there. I tried to use this pack, but retroarch was showing a WARN that it can’t load the shader because it cant find the path I don’t know why it was saying that the path is /usr/local/bin/shaders… Then I realized that, this is my actual retroarch bin patch. So, I put the retroarch bin into my custom path /home/user/libretro/ now this pack can be loaded.
HSM has talked about adding a shader folder syntax (or variable) to RetroArch, sometime in the future.
That way you could define your shader path in the settings and put these presets outside of the RetroArch folder.
I guess I’ll have to try out FB Neo too now and see how it looks and plays. Does it work with Mame merged roms?
Congrats on the 1000+ views and thanks for the new presets!
All of my Arcade game screenshots were created using FinalBurn Neo. My Arcade Sharp preset was also tested using FinalBurn Neo. I don’t know why they would look blurry in Mame. Perhaps the output resolution is set too high. My presets seem to work best on cores that output 224 - 240p resolution possibly up to 256 will look great as well.
I was turned off a very long time ago by some of the older versions of the RetroArch Mame Core. I prefer things that “just work” to some extent and I pick and choose carefully what I’m willing to spend my time and mental energy researching and understanding.
I also traditionally liked keeping things up to date and with Mame and their ever changing ROMs it got kind of confusing and tedious trying to keep up.
I’m sure there are lots of resources available both in the Libretto forums and the wider Interwebs with information on how to setup these emulators and their requirements for getting proper roms and all of that working properly.
It might work with some Merged Roms. You can try but different emulators have their particular instructions and recommendations whwn it comes to those things.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=163785.0
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/FinalBurn_Neo
Thanks very much! Seems like people are spreading the word.
You’re most welcome! I haven’t made a big fuss over these yet but the image quality improvement over the previous ones is huge!!! I just haven’t had much time to do more as I do this in little pockets of free time.
These new PVM Edition presets are almost interchangeable. There’s very little difference between the RGB Sharp PVM Edition and the Composite Sharp PVM Edition presets at first glance for example. Both look spectacular but I will continue to add some specific tweaks to suit the various platforms as I see fit.
Stay tuned for the updates and spread the word! Maybe you can try them out and share some of the first screenshots if you like the way they make your games look! Do remember that they were made and tested with 8 and 16-bit era games and systems in mind. Anything after that is uncharted territory for me and my presets but I do enjoy a challenge.
I’ve also seen some great looking PS1 shots! In the future I might include some early 32-bit era systems in my testing but the Dreamcast/Naomi/Atomiswave, 480p/480i “hi-res” 128bit (I think I heard that term used to describe Dreamcast at least once) era stuff has proven to have some unique shader preset requirements which may require a different set of tools to get the same type of effect that my presets have on the older content.
Do you emulate older generation systems? 8 and 16-bit era as well?
thank you for letting me know this.
Yeah it seems that anything above 640x480 internal resolution on Mame would cause blur.
Thanks for taking the time to link all these posts. That Launchbox post pretty much describes my situation and what I want to achieve, which is interchangeability of roms b/w the two cores. Doesn’t seem like it’s possible but I’ll take a look at the other posts too.
I have emulated 8 and16 bit era games but not on RA as I’m new to it. I have used Nestopia, Kega Fusion and Snes9x.