@Duimon @HyperspaceMadness Hey guys, I’ve been trying to set it up for the Sinden gun but having the border not completely 16:9 and covering the full screen messes the aim up as soon as you reach the sides of the 4:3 area, are you guys aware of this? Do you know how to use the Sinden border from the Shader parameters directly instead of the full border as overlay?
normally it aims fine i only play with overlays and 4:3 aspect,
you can even enable a 4:3 border with the sinden software ^^
did you recalibrate the gun if you use a 4:3 aspect ? also in MBZ settings keep the border as bright as possible , and depending on your tv/monitor size have the border set at least around 2 - 2.5 wide on smaller displays
for me everything works with the border MBZ draws … .if i understand it right you want the drawn border alone ?
you could make a screenshot cutout everything besides the border and use this as overlay
Hey, no I want to use the HSM bezels with the included border in the shaders, actually I managed to fix it, in the Sinden software, in the offsets tab you actually need to click the button “offsets from 16:9 to 4:3” (or something similar), this will automatically populate several offset fields according to what your set screen size is. But unfortunately that makes 16:9 games rather unplayable (for now I am just setting all the older 4:3 platforms so it’s fine for me.
oh for that you can simpley turn on the sinden border via the shader parameters and save the shader preset as game preset
you could also create a own folder for lightgun games and safe a content directory presets so it allways loads the border on startup for each game in this folder
another way is to use mbz´s wildcard feature and create params for lightgun games (thats how my auto tv presets manage this stuff if you want to take a look )
we kinda have to mess with the offset feature …but i use the sinden mostly with RA anyways only 16:9 games i play are the wii lightgun games via the dolphin core and the HOTD remake
Yep I am currently putting all the gun games into their own subfolder folder to create content directory shaders and input presets
Can you share more about that mbz wildcard feature?
here you can read some about it ^^
that alows to load many settings depending on different factors that the shader looks for on boot …like loading artwork per game name , enable settings just for one core and a lot more and still have everything just work via one single shader file …
.i just have mine saved as global setting and manage every change i want via params for cropping , art, the lightgun feature etc.
Actually I found out the root of the aiming being off with the shaders on I think, I removed the 4:3 offsets in the Sinden software and did put a 16:9 border overlay (the built-in Sinden I am just not able to put it on top of Retroarch for some reason even in borderless full-screen), I was fiddling with a few options in Retroarch and actually the aiming being inaccurate on the sides of the 4:3 area is because of the aspect ratio set to full which is a requirement to have the full shader displayed. When I set it to core provided it works fine, but obviously now the sides of the screen are black and it looks ugly lol. So maybe the solution (so that you really ultimately I’d like not the limit myself to 4:3 games only) is to use the regular shader with the border option and add an overlay with decorations and border to complement it.
wich overlays/presets do you use as i say it works fine for me even play wii games this way and the pointer if shown is real accurate :thinking :
And onow I can also switch to 16:9 without having to fiddle with offset settings of the gun.
i wonder why this works better for you
this is how i play non arcade lightgun games without any problems
and arcade games just have the cab ,artwork and some have the screen is a bit tilted what also works with the auto border
Really don’t know why. But basically the more I would aim to the sides let’s say to the left (but exactly the same behaviour to the right), the more the cross-hair would drift further away to the left. I reckon this might be due to unstable Sinden software settings.
i use the beta software and don´t have any problems
besides some lighting issues at first and based on your pic i don´t think thats the problem ^^
…but who knows if it conflicts with any stuff or other drivers at the end
i also saw some folks really had trouble to setup the gun and for me it was nearly plug&play like
Hi, Is there any way I can manually edit the shadow mask/slot mask layouts/arrangements? I’m stuck in a bit of hard place, as none of the mask options produce the layout necessary to properly reproduce certain 1980s RGB CGA CRTs. Here is a close up of the real monitor and slot(shadow) mask arrangement:
Here is an exaggerated close up of the shadow mask produced with Mask #1 in the MegaBezel shaders(this is the closest but as you will see, not what I need. I have resized and exaggerated the mask to be bigger inside the shader options so one can see):
Open the above fullscreen to see what I mean. Pay close attention to the grey stonework.
The issue at hand is on the real CRT, you have a horizontal black line separating gap contiguous triads. On the shader, you have a grey or white line separating these, with a black line above and below that grey line, thus creating graphical imperfections. Here is a crude mspaint I whipped up demonstrating the difference(fullscreen to see clearly):
As you will observe, in the MBZ shader you have double horizontal black bars between each triad with a grey line artifact(or whatever color is present on the pixel) between them, whereas on the real monitor the triads aren’t grid like, but almost overlapping waffles with a single thin horizontal black bar between them and nothing else.
Because of this imperfection in the existing shadow mask options, artifacts are produced on solid color zones of images that do not represent what is actually produced on the real CRT. I realize mask option 1 isn’t supposed to represent this CRT, so it isn’t actually an imperfection per-say, but it would be neat if we could add an additional option for this mask layout, or edit the existing one.
The beautiful Tandy CM-5 monitor is an important part of PC gaming history and would love to reproduce this as accurately as possible. In the 1980s there was not a better 16 color 320x200 monitor available for gaming that captured the gritty, antiquated atmosphere of the time period. They were bright, vivid, grainy and colorful. As a young lad my friends would come over and always comment how this display looked vastly superior to their IBM CGA/EGA or even PS/1 or PC Jr. monitors.
I would like to edit this in if I knew how, or perhaps someone else can help? I don’t see .png flatfiles of phosphor grids to add this in anywhere within the shader resources in my installed retroarch.
(p.s. forgive me if I am using the wrong term here. I believe the monitor is actually a slot mask, but for whatever reason I cannot enable this pattern in MBZ)
Edit: This was actually a pretty common shadow mask arrangement of the period, as Hunter K points out in one of his blog posts a few years back:
This layout is known as the “Slot Mask staggered grid” in his examples.
Wow plug and play! Consider yourself lucky
Anyways I think you made me want to retry again, and now it works fine…
Reinstalled HSM Mega Bezel again from scratch, and actually also removed the Y axis offset automatically added according to the diagonal screen size in the Sinden software settings.
Now using Duimon’s night TV setting preset
You must mean VGA since CGA was not RGB.
I’m really no expert but I think what you are seeing is just the scanline. If you remove the scanlines a slot mask should give you what you expect.
That’s the comical thing. In my original manual and the copy found online, Tandy says this is a 16 color RGB monitor:
https://manuals.plus/m/592b4454659e114409ba085914c51a7bd0f03b1158a49d7c84521bf1bd10611f
However, I recall in Radio Shack catalog listings and ads from way back in the day, and in present websites nowadays, they often refer to this as a CGA monitor(likely because they are of the Amiga breed and this term seems to be used loosely in that segment of retro PC society), whereas on the PC scene, CGA refers to 4 colors or composite out to a TV that produced more colors through artifacting:
Basically, the monitor connector has 9 pins which was common among CGA monitors of the time, unlike later VGA which used 15 pins. The Tandy 16 color standard straddled EGA and CGA, and competed originally with the PC Jr. upon release, which also had 16 color capability, which was remarkable way back in 1984 when every other PC could only display 4 colors. The Tandy 16 color mode is incompatible with EGA, and special drivers had to be written to output properly.
True. Tandy used some tricks to squeeze 16 colors out of a 4 color display. Still… not RGB in any way.
You will not be able to reproduce this with any existing shader, a slot mask is as close as you can get AFAIK.
oh the nintendo vs. redcaps ?
they are part of my MBZ preset/overlay pack
there is a bunch more besides those in the pack , and you could look into my pack to see how params and the wildcard stuff works
there are three links if you wanna check everything out scroll through and read the first post complete
Awesome, I’ll definitely have a look at that, they look really cool.