Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

Yikes! This is probably due to some precision problem. @guest.r when you run into these errors, do you know what tends to be the bits responsible?

Does the regular Guest Advanced shader work for you?

Also which Mega Bezel preset is this using, and which release?

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If you share what CPU/GPU model you’re using, perhaps I can recommend a shader preset that might be able to work for you. On my laptop, I think I used to use CRT_Easymode or CRT_Easymode_Halation. You can combine this with Blargg NTSC filters (some cores have them built in) for a nice look. There’s also a pack called Zomb’s Shaders that might have something that can work for you as well.

Another challenge of per game config files is that not everyone’s game backups have the same file names. I’m also trying to cater for the less experienced or technically inclined users and would like to keep things as simple and seamless as possible in terms of setup.

I agree that proper preservation is very important and I appreciate and support your efforts and goals in that regard.

By the way, I just made another slight update to my shader presets. So be sure to use these latest settings if trying them out. With every tweak they’re reaching ever closer to pixel art nirvana for me. @Brainbin74 I’m looking forward to hearing your observations and findings after comparing them to your Sony KVM.

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Don’t be in a hurry to hear the truth. I am the truth. Never ask questions if you are not ready to hear the answer. The ego is a tool, it is for man to use the tool, it is not the tool that must use man. :innocent: After these words of wisdom I would say, can you give me a valid link that has the latest update of the preset. I pull up thousands of posts here and which one has links is valid… My friend, today it’s raining, the weather is gray, it smells like retrogaming today.

I know that the config files must have the same name. But the truth is that every good retrogamer should have tosec roms. And chd rip cd’s… Archive.org is open to everyone, and you can find all the fullset of the consoles… Archive.org is well named, the preservation of roms and video games and magazines. The one who uses retroarch can make an effort, humans tend to have everything easy, everything is already done for them, and even in this case some complain…

If your roms are misnamed? Whose fault is it that your Roma are misnamed? How do you scan and number your retroarch game covers? If you scan your games and download the game box covers, they have the right name.

Then who is using retroarch and is not even able to open a text file that is located in the retroarch folder, and that is called CONFIG. Inside the core is named, then the name of the games corrected. Either you rename your rom in the right way, or you rename the config file with the name of your rom (which has the wrong name, or you download a well named tosec.

I want to help humans on my side, but if they are not able to use a computer, it’s not my problem, I’m already doing my part of the work, and I expect from a human a minimum of his side. I do this for free on my time, and the users would like everything to be perfect without understanding anything on their side?

No I expect a minimum that the user knows how to rename a rom, or a file, otherwise he buys nes mini hdmi console, or ready made things, limited for sure, but that doesn’t ask anything to the user but put his butt on the sofa, and grab a controller… That’s my point. To want to help, mache the work, the human becomes dependent and faineant…when we love we learn… If the person doesn’t want to learn and only complain? There are limits I think… That’s my friend…

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All the links point to the same shader presets.

It’s okay and I’m certainly not in a rush. The truth is the truth and your opinion is your opinion. You said you would do some comparisons using Bonk’s Revenge and stuff so it just had me curious. It shouldn’t bother me whatever your findings or comments. It might just be interesting to see how they compare as I don’t have access to a CRT TV right now.

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Sony crt is not available. Without the curvature?. Well my friend, I see that users have made addons.

I think it would be good to group all these things together.they are everywhere. You have to search, snoop… Whatever, but it’s a shame.

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Links to @soqueroeu, @TheNamec, @Orionsangel, and my graphics thread, are in the “Resources:” section of the first post on this thread. (All grouped together. :wink:)

I also have the relevant links in my main post on my thread.

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Thank you for being a leader. Yes, it is useful to pool resources. Can’t wait to try all these things. See you soon.

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It was an old release, i didn’t changed anything since it worked flawless.

I will do some test and update u asap.

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Ok, thanks for the update.

Can you try the latest Mega Bezel and see what it looks like?

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Honestly @Brainbin74, this kind of reply is rubbing me the wrong way. Though I can only speak for myself, I am likely not the only one. I’m not sure if this was an attempt at humor or not, but if it was, you may want to be careful about this because humor on forums can easily come across as being unkind.

You are new here, so I would suggest reading things more closely and asking questions instead of “telling truth”. As @Duimon kindly pointed out, the links that you were looking for were in the first post of this thread.

I also find this unpleasant. This post sounds a lot more like “this is how it is”. There are better ways to offer the information you know without sounding like a dictation. I really wish this forum to be a place where people can ask questions, share their experience and we can all learn a little without a feeling of pushing or forcing.

I also want to add that you are currently on the Mega Bezel thread, so the discussion should mainly be about this, and posts like this tend to derail threads and pull them off topic.

If you would like to start a thread about sharing the information you know about how a user can set up their roms to be the most easy to use and consistent, I recommend you do that instead of doing it here.

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Well the problem is that i should update RL and i fear that lol

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Not sure what RL is but if you’re concerned about an update breaking something you can make a backup copy before updating. I’ve done this with RetroArch at times and I’m definitely going to to do it with HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader because I really like the way things look now and don’t want to lose them if there are major changes which affect my presets.

What I do is just rename the folder I’m not using to Bezel Old or Bezel New and I can switch between them if I feel the need to.

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Greetings @HyperspaceMadness, @guest.r, @Duimon, I’ve been doing some testing of my latest presets on different games and systems (for educational purposes of course) and all was looking perfect except when I tested Ninja Spirit in Beetle PCE Fast. On the sections with grey backgrounds, the vignette transitions very harshly and it’s a bit distracting. I don’t know if this is just a rare side effect of the combination of settings or something that’s expected and understood. It’s not noticeable in the Newpixie-Clone_Smoothed_Rolling-Scanlines__STD__GDV preset, nor my Arcade Sharp preset - which both use the NTSC-J colour gamut. It particularly affects the NTSC-U colour gamut and is even more glaring when halation is set to 0. Even a slight amount of halation helps to smoothen out the transition a bit but it’s still unusable on NTSC-U. As a result of this I’m switching my Composite-Sharp preset to the NTSC-J colour gamut and I’ve added a slight bit of halation to help with such transitions.

I have some screenshots of the issue, however, I now realized that even the original PNG screenshots from RetroArch show quite a bit of quality degradation. So whatever you’re seeing in the screenshots is actually worse in game.

Investigation of harsh vignette transition in rare cases when using NTSC-U colour gamut that are not present when using NTSC-J colour gamut.

NTSC-J, Halation 0.175 - Good

NTSC-U, Halation 0.175 - Harsh

NTSC-J, Halation 0.0 - Not as bad as NTSC-U but still harsh, easily noticeable on the right of the picture on the partially broken wall

NTSC-U, Halation 0.0 - Very Harsh

NTSC-U, Halation 0.0, Use Vignette 0.0 (No)

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Hi @Cyber, The vignette in the Mega Bezel comes from the Grade pass, so the issue is there, I’m not sure why it would be different for each color gamut, but I believe you that it is. To see more directly where it is happening, if you change the shader passes value to the number of passes where grade appears in the list and you should be able to see the issue more directly.

Grade was created by @dogway, so I’m not sure what might be going on. One of the things about the grade vignette is that it actually affects the contrast amount in the vignetted areas, rather than just darkening. Another thing about applying the vignette in grade is that it is happening at the core resolution, so the transitions are more obvious when the vignette is applied at a lower resolution.

So if we are getting harsh transitions I may need to move the vignette to after the CRT pass like Guest’s standard vignette which happens in the deconvergence pass if IIRC.

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Okay, I can try that when I get a chance.

Well it might be worth a try. Hopefully that won’t break or degrade anything else that was looking and working fine. This is the first and only game that I’ve seen this so far and I’ve only noticed it in the sections with that grey wall.

Investigation of harsh vignette transition in rare cases when using NTSC-U colour gamut that are not present when using NTSC-J colour gamut. Exhibit #2

NTSC-J - Purplish sky and purplish appearance of other blue backgrounds and sprites. Vignette transition isn’t bad but it isn’t as seamless as in NTSC-U in this example. Remember it’s worse in actual gameplay.

NTSC-U - Nice blue skies like I remember and perfect vignette transition. Also, more neutral looking white point to me. How do I decide which one to keep using?

NTSC-J

NTSC-U

NTSC-J

NTSC-U

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I did this and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I tried lowering the number of passes to different numbers including 15, 14, 12, 9 and 4. Most of them just seemed to disable some of the settings like ScaleFX and things like rolling scanlines. When I clicked on apply, the shader passes seemed to reset to 40. Also my colour gamut reset to NTSC-J when I clicked Apply and when I switched back to NTSC-U, the harsh vignette transition was still there. Is there anything else that I can do to help get to the bottom of this?

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The vignette is a cosmetic effect, which does not exist on crt. I don’t know what it’s for, but on the grey wall, it casts shadows that are not in the game, nor programmed in the game by the developers, so we might as well avoid using this effect.

Did you try to take screenshots with geforce experience? For example it captures hdr, in pc games correctly… I think this is more representative of the reality, no? There is also the option gpu screenshoot to activate or not depending on the need.

Do you have an oled tv like me? You have lg and I have panasonic. Do you know that it is possible to force the rec2020 range instead of rec709? If you want your oled tv to show the right colors, you must not be in rec709. You have to force your color range rec709 > rec2020.

By doing this you increase your gamut, and the ability of your TV to display the right colors. I can never have the red and blue identical to the crt in rec709. The crt has a way of displaying colors that modern screens can’t achieve in rec709. The crt gamma is different it can be 2.6 to 2.8, the crt will display the darker tones though clearly.

If your TV is factory calibrated in rec2020 no problem. If not you are forced to use rec709. My TV is well calibrated by panasonic in factory so I can use rec2020 without problem.

What is not the case of modern digital TV screens … That’s why I asked guest for more gamma settings to be sure of the rendering throughout the image process with the mask 7 trinitron and scanline superposition. But I have nothing to teach you here.

The Real Analog TV and Standard Definition TV Color Gamuts

Instead of the official NTSC Gamut colors, the practical phosphor colors that were actually used in early color TVs were developed by the Conrac Corporation, which eventually became the SMPTE-C Color Gamut Standard. TV production studios used Conrac color monitors to produce their broadcast TV content, so it was the Conrac Color Gamut rather than the NTSC Gamut that was the real color television Standard Gamut. The SMPTE-C Gamut is not that different from today’s sRGB / Rec.709 Gamut, which is 13 percent larger than SMPTE-C. Many later Gamut standards were based on SMPTE-C, including up to Rec.601 for Digital Standard Definition TV. We are now going to skip over lots of history and get to the Display Color Gamuts that are in use today…

sRGB / Rec.709 Color Gamut

For over 10 years the main Color Gamut that has been used for producing virtually all Current consumer content for digital cameras, HD TVs, the internet, and computers, including photos, videos, and movies is a dual standard called sRGB / Rec.709. If you want to see accurate colors for this content on just about any consumer product, then the display needs to match the sRGB / Rec.709 Standard Color Gamut – not larger and not smaller, because the colors will then appear wrong and also be either too saturated or under-saturated.

There are still widely held beliefs by lots of reviewers and consumers that viewing content on a display with a larger Color Gamut is actually better, but it is definitely worse because the display cannot produce colors that are not present in the original content, so the colors are just shown distorted and over-saturated. We include the Standard sRGB / Rec.709 Gamut in Figures 3 to 6.

Below we’ll show you both visually and quantitatively what the sRGB / Rec.709 Color Gamut looks like in both the 1976 and 1931 CIE Diagrams. https://www.displaymate.com/Display_Color_Gamuts_1.htm

To simplify the thing play an alladin, if the apple on the bottom right is not red, but rather dark it is an effect of the color scale, on my crt the apple is bright red. In rec709 with in addition a mask and scan line your apple is dark… Are you going to correct this with the gamma? And everything else will become too light… The red of the apple is 100% red… Google Photos

Good to you cyber.

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I am wondering if that is due to your physical hardware limitations. Unless you are running on an OLED or Wide-LED display, different color gamuts will be missing key colors needed to display smooth gradients.

IIRC it just affected the bezel reflection a bit differently. (And could be accommodated with Global reflection parameters.)

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BTW. When I work in Illustrator, this is most noticeable in the gray-scale gamut, which might help explain the gray wall.

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