Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

[HyperspaceMadness]

Thanks for the detailed report!

@Cyber

Just tested it and it’s not really noticeable in the newpixie clone base preset but it’s there in the 2 variations

I’ll check this out to make sure it’s consistent, and avoid the over exposed situation you are seeing. The newpixie clone’s contrast is a bit wacky I think because I was trying to match newpixie’s color adjustment with contrast and brightness.

@Cyber

On another note, none of the presets with the word “Guest” in them are loading.

I think maybe you are talking about Guest-SM, which haven’t worked for a while and that I will be removing next release.

@Cyber

Update: I’ve found the cause of the “greenness”. It was cranking the Signal Resolution Q all the way up tp 261 that did it.

Is this the default, or something you adjusted?

@Cyber

@HyperspaceMadness

This is probably due to the vignette/brightness difference you were showing

Okay. Are you sure it’s not due to changes in the corner reflections or something similar? I remember seeing a previous post where someone suggested to you that you change the size of the corner reflections and you seemed to be fine with making the adjustments.

This is true I did make some fixes here, but I think that was in the previous release rather than this release. This release was especially focused on fixing some base coding wiring in how the scaling was being inherited between image layers as well as adjusting a couple layer image names and layer order.

@Cyber

I used to be a perennial tinkerer but these days I prefer to play and enjoy my time once I have things setup the way I like. I’ll just keep and rename 2 folders when I switch from play mode to test mode. In terms of coming up with solutions and addressing things, I’m all for that. I’m just afraid of breaking things after I get them right.

Cool, basically over time things will become less likely to change.

[Cyber]

@HyperspaceMadness

Is this the default, or something you adjusted?

No, the default is 25. I explained why I adjusted it in my post.

@Cyber

I increased that to eliminate the red bleeding way too much into the yellow in the power bars in Street Fighter II. I’ll have to take a look at rebalancing it but increasing the hue has helped to tame the “greenness” a bit.

The default setting results in nice, vivid yellow status text and gold rings (almost golden brown) but the status text has a red tinge on the outline. The default setting also causes red to bleed too heavily into the yellow health bars in Street Fighter 2 which is a very inauthentic and distracting look. I’ll have to find the minimum setting where the colour bleeding isn’t so bad. I think I got a good result so far by setting it to 145 and I had to put back the hue to 4 to get it the rest of the way.

It’s easy to see what happens to the yellow just by turning on the resolution info text and playing around with the setting. The higher you go the more greenish the text becomes. I might try lowering it slightly so that I can keep the hue below 4 or at 4 and get the yellow in Sonic The Hedgehog right because increasing the hue too much has some other undesirable effects on the colour red in some games.

Update:

After some more testing, I find Signal Resolution Q at 145 and Hue at 4 looks perfect across the different games and platforms I use to test!

@HyperspaceMadness

This may be some change in the newpixie clone preset

@HyperspaceMadness

I’ll check this out to make sure it’s consistent, and avoid the over exposed situation you are seeing. The newpixie clone’s contrast is a bit wacky I think because I was trying to match newpixie’s color adjustment with contrast and brightness.

Can you freeze or bring back the Newpixie-Clone_Smoothed_Rolling-Scanlines_STD_GDV.slang preset (and all its dependencies and base presets) that were in the previous release as well as the bezel reflection settings when the screen is completely dark and instead make subsequent changes to new variations of these instead?

The Newpixie-clone variation I started with was excellent, however not without its flaws. I’ve tweaked the settings to something which in my opinion is close to perfection after having lost access to the previous Death To Pixels and gained access to your awesome creation - this HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader!

I make these requests and suggestions with the utmost humility and understanding that this is all very highly subjective. In addition to that my judgements are based on viewing on a 55" 4K OLED TV. Users of lower resolution or different screen sizes and types may not experience the same wow factor and sense of nostalgia (being back there and then) that I am feeling when I use my presets.

I’ll update my presets when I get a chance with updated screenshots to follow a bit later.

As always, thank you and everyone else who have made this possible and made me an even happier camper!

[HyperspaceMadness]

@TheNamec

Hey @guest.r! Here’s the video for C1201 monochrome dark amber gameplay, an exclusive sneak peek of homebrew Prince of Persia on Commodore 64 Breadbin from my work in progress Mega Bezel Commodore Pack just for you!

Looks great! I love the little lighting on the datasette

I think I will add back the negative crop soon, now that I’ve figured out a way to do it without much cost, should allow us to make the areas which are supposed to be unlit screen at the edges look legit

Just as an FYI some of the next things on my plate to change in the Mega Bezel are:

• Add Show Over Frame feature for the device layer
• Check Newpixie presets for contrast
• Caching Static Layered Graphics
  • Testing is showing about a 3x speed up for the ADV preset when using the cache
• Rotate Viewport to help use with FBNeo
• Negative Cropping
• Add Cyber’s death to pixels presets to experimental
• Add GDV-NTSC

[TheNamec]

@HyperspaceMadness

• Add Show Over Frame feature for the device layer
• Check Newpixie presets for contrast
• Caching Static Layered Graphics
• Testing is showing about a 3x speed up for the ADV preset when using the cache
• Rotate Viewport to help use with FBNeo
• Negative Cropping
• Add Cyber’s death to pixels presets to experimental
• Add GDV-NTSC

[Cyber]

I wonder who will be the first to come up with a simple to use product that does all of this using specialized, optimized hardware?

It would be like having the best of both worlds if hardware device users like original console users, FPGA users, Android and Rasberry Pi users, old VHS and betamax users or those who just have collections of 480p video captures lying around could just plug their old devices or even computers using HDMI (as well as older input formats) in and get that high quality CRT-like filter experience that we in this scene have become so accustomed to!

[Cyber]

Some “dirty” screenshot crops of the CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Arcade - Sharp) preset in action!

[passballtotucker]

Having shaders this good on the mister would go a long way in improving the experience once all crts are dead and gone. Hopefully by the time that happens mister will have a gpu and modern tvs won’t have motion blur.

[HyperspaceMadness]

@Cyber

I noticed that the vignette is much more pronounced especially on a white background than in the previous version.

@Cyber

Hi there, I looked into this and it appears that the Halation value is what is causing the issue, if you set this lower, perhaps to 0 in your presets then this goes away. It’s strange that it appeared this latest Mega Bezel release, because I didn’t change the presets compared to the last version.

@guest.r, is there any change in GDV which would cause halation to act any differently in the last 2-3 months? I had it set to 0.5 and you can see the before and after the Mega Bezel release, quite strange, it’s always possible I made some sort of error when I transcribed the changes into my versions of the shaders.

[Cyber]

Greetings,

@HyperspaceMadness

this goes away.

It might go away but what else might change as a result? Does it make sense that a halation value of 0.5 would cause such a large anomaly? Why does it affect the Newpixie-clone variation and not the base preset and not some of the other presets? What’s different about them? Do any of the unaffected ones use a halation setting of 0.5 or more? Is this a bug or an intended change in the GDV causing this? So many variables and possibilities. Perhaps waiting to hear from guest.r then retracing some steps over what’s different about this release might uncover the root?

I don’t expect you to answer these questions eh. These are just the thoughts and questions that have popped into my mind.

Are you considering a few reversions if you can’t pinpoint where things might have gone amiss?

[guest.r]

@HyperspaceMadness

@guest.r, is there any change in GDV which would cause halation to act any differently in the last 2-3 months? I had it set to 0.5 and you can see the before and after the Mega Bezel release, quite strange, it’s always possible I made some sort of error when I transcribed the changes into my versions of the shaders.

With at least intelaced modes there was a bug regarding halation, a value used for it’s calculation was either 0.0 or undefined, prior the august releases. Now it’s set to 1.0, resulting in stronger halation effect with some circumstances, but this behavior is more correct.

[Cyber]

@guest.r

With at least intelaced modes there was a bug regarding halation,

I wonder if that means it currently only affects the presets and variations that use rolling scanlines?

@guest.r

Now it’s set to 1.0, resulting in stronger halation effect with some circumstances

What would be the correct halation setting to achieve equivalent results to a 0.5 setting before the bug was fixed? Is it possible that that bug resulted in halation being disabled altogether at 0.5 or would it have just been weaker at 0.5?

That “mistake” resulted in some beautiful looking screenshots though! I really hope the pot tastes as good after we apply the “correct” settings. My brain and eyes really don’t mind something being technically incorrect once it looks good and feels right.

Thanks for your great work though! It’s really amazing what you all have given to the world!

[guest.r]

@Cyber

What would be the correct halation setting to achieve equivalent results to a 0.5 setting before the bug was fixed? Is it possible that that bug resulted in halation being disabled altogether at 0.5 or would it have just been weaker at 0.5?

With new version halation is quite strong at 0.5. I would suggest lowering the value to 0.1-0.2 and see how it goes. Halation was definitely weaker before (with ‘interlaced’ mode), with results varying between drivers.

[HyperspaceMadness]

@guest.r

With at least intelaced modes there was a bug regarding halation, a value used for it’s calculation was either 0.0 or undefined, prior the august releases. Now it’s set to 1.0, resulting in stronger halation effect with some circumstances, but this behavior is more correct.

Ah this is definitely it then, thanks for the answer!

This preset which has interlacing threshold reduced so interlacing is always on. Probably what happened is when I was working on the halation wasn’t doing much so I had it cranked up, and now that it is working properly it is set too high.

I’ll update this on the next release, for anyone using the newpixie preset you can just edit the newpixie preset and set halation to a low value like 0.1 and you should be good

[Cyber]

@guest.r

I would suggest lowering the value to 0.1-0.2 and see how it goes.

Thank you very much sir!

[Cyber]

@HyperspaceMadness

I’ll update this on the next release, for anyone using the newpixie preset you can just edit the newpixie preset and set halation to a low value like 0.1 and you should be good

Glad you caught the bug! Thanks for including adding my presets to your to do list! Guess I have some more testing to do when I get a chance! I’ll see if this has any effect on the inner bezel edge highlights (can you tell me the correct term for this please?) that went missing when the screen darkens to full black in this latest version.

[HyperspaceMadness]

@Cyber

I’ll see if this has any effect on the inner bezel edge highlights (can you tell me the correct term for this please?) that went missing when the screen darkens to full black in this latest version.

So there is the dynamic reflection on the bezel inner edge which should disappear when the screen is black, and there is a static subtle whitish highlight on the bezel inner edge which does not disappear when the screen is black.

[Duimon]

Shouldn’t the inner edge highlight disappear when the screen goes black? (Since it is a reflection.)

[HyperspaceMadness]

There are some very slight static highlights so that you can still see that there is a bezel there.

It sort of mimics what you would see on a black bezel in a room which isn’t super dark.

[Cyber]

@HyperspaceMadness

there is a static subtle whitish highlight on the bezel inner edge which does not disappear when the screen is black.

Ahhh…thanks this is probably what I was referring to. Were you planning on leaving it as it is in the new version or going back to the previous setting? Also, what settings would I have to adjust to have it return to the way it was in the previous version.

Old:

Old zoomed in:

New:

New zoomed in:

I prefer the old look.

@Duimon

Shouldn’t the inner edge highlight disappear when the screen goes black? (Since it is a reflection.)

While I don’t know the original intent and purpose of the creator of this static reflection, the fact that it’s static should indicate that the currently displayed image shouldn’t have any effect on it except for masking it with its own dynamic reflections. Even in the new version it’s not disappearing completely but it’s almost completely gone. I’m not harping on the simulation or technical aspects but more on the artistic and subjective side of things. My untrained brain probably interpreted it as reflections from the room lights and even though so minor and apparently insignificant, I noticed it enough to feel as if something was missing and not as good as in the previous iteration.

[Duimon]

That’s fine and all but up until about 1 minute ago noone ever called it a static reflection.

And I think the creator just told us his intent.