That’s right it will crop the cutscene as well. That’s why a possible automatic option to try to crop out the black areas might be interesting.
I think one good question about the N64 is what area of the screen was visible on a consumer television, would black bars appear? Or were they always offscreen.
Isn’t that the reason the RA developers included crop overscan in the first place. I think if the image needs cropping, the parts of the cutscene lost were never meant to be seen. Either that or the game developers intended black bars.
Unless the aspect ratio actually changes between the cutscene and the game?
Yes I think this is correct
Well, it’s normal during the intro menu, then goes to the black bars during the cutscene and stays like that during the game, I would understand or not mind if it just went to the black bars only during the cutscene but it stays like that for the rest of the game.
Hi guys, I’m in the process of building a new arcade cabinet around Retroarch (with powerful PC and graphic card) and I absolutely want to use the awesome HSM Reflection Shader.
I doubt between a 16:9 or 16:10 monitor. I’d love a 16:10 (closer to 4:3, more vertical space…) but I’d like to be sure that HSM Reflection Shader works on 16:10 screens.
As far as I see, HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader seems fully proportion agnostic (it generates the reflection and borders dynamically based on parameters, not using harcdoded graphic bezels designed for a specific ratio). Am I right? Has anyone tried Reflection Shader on a 16:10 monitor?
Cheers!
Hi there, yes the mega bezel is proportion agnostic, when using it you set your Retroarch aspect ratio to whatever the monitor is.
What will happen with a 16x10 monitor is that if you use one of the standard graphics from Duimon lets say which are 16x10 some of the graphic should be sliced off on the edges but otherwise will be perfect. You will have the option to have the images squash to the 16x10, but this may not be the best graphic result. If you make your own graphics at 16x10 this will work perfectly as well.
One thing you might want to consider if you love arcade games and you haven’t seen it before is a vertical cabinet, it’s basically a 40"-50" 4K screen turned sideways which shows the image of a full cabinet from the control panel upward. This allows you to do the arcade thing but also get a good size for vertically oriented games as well as horizontal. There’s a group of artists who have a thread started by @ArsInvictus where they are doing a bunch of super high quality arcade graphics for this format.
@Thoggo has also put together an awesome site to distribute graphics and show off the format.
Thanks!
Last question: I understand that the Reflection Shader does not need any graphic overlay to look like this:
On the previous image the full monitor bezel (the inner part where the reflections are drawn + the outer part) are generated by the shader (whatever the resolution is, whatever the aspect ratio is). This is why we can adjustthe border width using slangp parameters. Am I right?
Vertical cabinets look amazing, but I think I still prefer the more classic view of an old school 4:3 CRT (16:10 + your shader…)
Cheers!
You’re welcome!
That’s right, the bezel (part where the reflection is drawn) and the frame (part just outside the bezel) is automatically generated by the shader and will scale up and down with the screen and screen aspect ratio (and can be adjusted so it’s as wide or thin as you like). The only thing in this image which uses a texture is the carbon fiber texture in the background, but that’s inside the shader there is no Retroarch overlay.
Yeah if that’s the case then 16x10 will work great 
Actually I’m considering a servo mechanism to auto-rotate the 16:10 monitor from horizontal to vertical… I’d need to figure out some way to auto-change the frontend from H to V (like an iPad), but that’s another story ))
Thanks for your awesome work, @HyperspaceMadness!
Toni
No problem, I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
Yeah this is what I was considering at the beginning of my emulation adventure as well When running retroarch vertical I find the best way is to set windows to portrait mode (otherwise the retroarch menus show up sideways), there’s probably scripted utilities which can trigger that. Although you need to set Retroarch to a vertical aspect as well.
Good luck on your build!
Hey, I’ve been out of the loop for a while. I recall reading that some new features would be availble for the ‘next’ version of Retroarch. Is 1.9.1 it or did you mean 2.0? 
Ha, nope you don’t have to wait until V2.0, 1.9.1 was the version I was waiting for. I’m currently cleaning up some last bits for this release and expect to release by the end of this weekend 
I was testing out the ppsspp core and noticed that the auto-aspect detection was not working for it. It seemed to think the core was 4:3 and had to manually set it to 16:9.
Could it be because I already had 16:9 set as the ratio under video? Does look great though, much better than bumping the resolution. Though the huge borders look a little funny.
I think the shader is just not catching this as a resolution which should be PAR which in this case should be 16x9,I’ll add it to the list of resolutions to check and it will catch it next time
I think I also need to check the scaling on the side bezels when the screen widens because they are getting wider than they are supposed to be
I was trying out the version without the bezel, seems a bezel is not really necessary when the core aspect ratio matches your monitor. Though maybe it is me but the scanlines look really aggressive, they stand out a lot more when the image takes up the whole screen (no bezel). Could it be because of the size of the image? The core’s resolution is also a little weird, 480x272.
While not necessary, it is a handheld, and the use of a graphic with HSM’s LCD preset really feel right when playing.
There is a resolution multiplier in the core, I think it looks best at 2X with an LCD shader.
Oooh that looks quite nice. I’ll have to try it out. How do you change the background image to match? I admit I have not kept up with the development.
I have another question. Is there a difference between the Simple version and the regular besides the fact that the simple only has the reflection.
Both versions look nice. Though LCD might look better on something like GBA. The colors look a little too washed out on my screen when using the LCD one.
These presets will change significantly for the next version which should be released this weekend. There are a few different presets but should be simpler to understand the difference between them:
For the lcd preset you currently are using you can adjust the contrast by changing the gamma and ambient parameters for the lcd shader at the end of the parameter list
I was testing the new NGP and NGPC graphics from @Duimon but come across with some shader issues. The vertical color change lines on the background.
This is the previous shader I was using;
And this is the new graphics with your shaders;
You might have already fixed it on the new upcoming shaders update but here we go anyway.
If you are talking about the blue lines, then yes, HSM has fixed that. It looks very pretty now! 
Oh, and thanks for the side by side comparison. Looking at it, I feel pretty good about my transparent joystick and buttons. 
