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.
