Hi, I’ve got a bit of an issue with the 1080p presets. When using these presets, something just seemed off, but I couldn’t place it. I am very new to shaders and CRTs in general, so please forgive my lack of understanding here. I think that the issue is that the horizontal gap between each fully exposed pixel is so small that it doesn’t appear at all. Each row just blends into each other, making the game appear to just have these huge vertical lines. This is most obvious to me on Ocarina of Time’s title screen, where the majority of the screen has no visible horizontal gaps.
Here’s a few screenshots of different games, using three different presets compared to HSM’s 3-ADV preset.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at them. Can you state the complete names of the presets in question that are doing this please?
I now realized that you did state the names - CyberLab SNES, CyberLab SNES Sharp and CyberLab N64.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Also, have you downloaded my very latest preset pack along with the latest HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader? They were both updated yesterday.
Nintendo 64 or any other system is not going to show very distinct horizontal scanline gaps if you’re using double or more internal resolution. So if your N64 Core is set to 640 x 480 you wouldn’t get as strong or as thick scanlines as if it were set to 320 x 240.
Ah, my bad, I was using an old version. It does look better after updating, the scanline gaps are definitely more visible now. Though they might still not be emphasized enough at 1080, the vertical bars are still pretty obvious to me. I’m thinking that not much can be done about it though, I looked closer at my screenshots in a viewer that doesn’t blur when zoomed in, and realized there’s really only two pixel rows for each scanline to work with at 1080 (which in hindsight is really obvious, I should have realized that earlier, 1080\480=2.25). I’ll be sure to check this shader out again on n64 after I upgrade to a 1440p or 4k monitor.
For the record though, those vertical bars are pretty obvious to me on n64 using all of your presets. And yeah, I was using the native resolution, 640x480.
Just added a couple presets for Mobile or Low spec PC gamers. You’ll find them in the MBZ__5__Potato_No_Reflections folder.
PSA: In the near future we (the members of the Mega Bezel Team) are going to be moving our respective projects to the “Mega_Bezel_Packs” folder. I’m just putting this out there in advance so that users won’t be caught off guard.
Judging by the look of the mask pattern and scanlines, probably my Computer Monitor presets might come close from a distance but my modern CyberLab Ultimate Virtual Slot Mask CRT-1PT2RTA and CyberLab Slot Mask II, III & IV OLED presets would probably look even closer.
Slot Mask IV OLED is not only for OLED by the way and you can use a higher GSL Scanline type to have more intense scanlines. Remember to toggle the Mask Layout to match your screen.
You can also adjust the Slot Mask Height to 3 to more closely match the height of the Slot Mask in the picture.
These recommendations are all based on using a 4K screen by the way.
You have to load full resolution, then open in new tab or window, zoom in or view fullscreen in order for these to look correct because of the mask and scanline settings.
My CyberLab Arcade Sharp PVM-EDITION also looks really nice and crisp but it’s based on Trinitron (Aperture Grill mask) while that Phillips screenshot uses a Slot Mask.
You have to load full resolution, then open in new tab or window, zoom in or view fullscreen in order for these to look correct because of the mask and scanline settings.
Actually, all I get to enjoy is an old 42" Visio TV screen, at 1080. One of these decades I’ll upgrade, but the wife probably won’t let me do it for retrogaming alone
Since my packs contain only presets and not shaders you shouldn’t encounter similar issues, however you can encounter issues using outdated presets on newer versions of HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader because the Shaders themselves sometimes change rapidly requiring presets to be updated. So best practice would entail removing the old folder or presets before updating but most of the time preset names remain the same so overwriting can be sufficient. There are rare instances where I might rename a preset or remove presets that might have been unintentionally included though. In cases like that overwriting will not be sufficient to remove things that shouldn’t really be in the folder.
This can and does happen on a real TV. I tried my best to adjust the scaling to tweak the amount of overscan per console and resolution but I didn’t spend any time adjusting it for 1600 x 900 though.
You can play around with the settings in the preset to adjust this to your liking.
If you don’t want this happening at all, you can set the viewport to follow the bezel by turning off bezel independent scale and set integer scale mode to 0.
This might introduce other (possibly unwanted) side effects but this is just the nature of these things.
This time I have tried using the pack MBZ 1 with full reflections and 1080p CyberLab__SNES__ADV preset but retroarch then runs 100% of my GPU GTX 1050 2GBs performance.
Menu runs on like 32 FPS. At least I can bet that 10 years old+ systems may struggle with that pack.
Hmmm…that’s why I created my MBZ_2_Performance_No_Reflections presets.
I couldn’t run MBZ_1_Advance_Full_Reflections presets on my GTX 970 at 4K60fps.
You know there’s something you could try if you want to get better performance from my presets.
Most of them use the “MBZ_0_SMOOTH-ADV_ADV.slanp” base preset.
However not all of them actually use the additional features of the more advanced, slower performing base preset. Even if they do, the difference might be quite minimal in terms of visual impact.
So what you can do is find the base presets that have the “MBZ__0__SMOOTH-ADV_GDV.slangp” in them and change it to “MBZ__1__ADV__GDV.slangp”.
You should see an improvement in performance while the presets should still look good.
An easy way to do this is with Notepad++ Find in Files feature.
I also recently created MBZ__5__POTATO_NO_REFLECTIONS presets for low end systems and mobile/single board devices.
Of course you won’t get realtime reflections with those, but they should still look beautiful especially when paired with my custom Blargg NTSC filters or even the ones that come with some cores.
Remember this whole exercise started off with me creating stuff primarily for my personal needs and to run on my particular setup(s).
The MBZ_2_Performance_No_Reflections folder was simply an attempt to get the presets working properly on my GTX 970 @ 4K 60fps. This was all I needed, I only had to give up reflections. It also allowed the presets themselves to be identical and look identical bar the reflections.
I did try all the other base presets, including the STD one, however the presets didn’t retain much of their fidelity.
Most likely due to my extensive use of Pre-scaling, Scale FX and MDAPT back then. Things have admittedly evolved quite a bit.
In my earlier testing I found that by reducing resolution from 4K to 1080p resulted in a significant reduction in performance requirements needed to maintain a steady 60fps. That was how I initially got things to work on my GTX 970. My presets were also so fine tuned at 1080p that in my opinion, users were not giving up that much by opting to run at the lower resolution.
This plus the ability to combine running at a lower resolution with the MBZ__2__ADV_NO_REFLECTIONS base preset were my first attempts at having a middle ground.
I subsequently came across @Soqueroeu’s-TV Backgrounds, which was something that fit what I had been looking for ever since giving up on the original “Death To Pixels” cgp preset by @Birm.
I wondered how best to integrate my presets with them and after realizing that all of his presets use the MBZ__3__STD_GDV base preset, I decided to just create a preset from the ground up of course while using everything that I had learned and possibly borrowing some settings here and there from some of my other presets.
Scaling things down really helped smoothen things out and significantly reduced the need for smoothing and heavy prescaling. I did run into some new challenges though due to the sizing of the viewports and the introduction of even more severe moire patterns. I overcame those challenges and was quite satisfied with the results.
The next step came from me wanting to do even better de-dithering on Sonic the Hedgehog’s waterfalls now that I no longer had access to MDAPT.
This gave rise to Blargg_NTSC_Genesis_Composite_CyberLab_Special_Edition and it’s counterparts.
Now I had the best of both worlds with minimal performance cost.
This was my second attempt at having a “middle ground”.
My scope is limited somewhat by what equipment I have available to me and by what I might actually use.
I have done stuff in the past based on user feedback however, for example RGB presets for those who grew up on SCART.
The reason why I now have mobile device/low end PC presets is probably because at some point I might want to be able to run them on my phone.
I never intended to be all encompassing and limitless in my support and scope. Just to share what I might actually use with the rest of the community and the world.
At the moment time is my main limiter. I only do this in little snippets of free time, most of the time while doing other things.
