Hello author, first of all thank you very much for producing such an excellent piece of work! I’m having some problems with the setup, after following your tutorial, my mask and shader don’t seem to match, as you can see in the picture above, on the left side of the screen (where the shader is attached to the mask) it’s shifted a little bit to the right, it doesn’t look very comfortable, how can I fix this situation?
Thanks to all the hard work on MegaBezel by all the shader writers, I’ve been able to modify presets to do the impossible. Way back when I was a young lad, I always dreamt of hooking my Tandy RGB color monitor up to a VGA card, because the RGB monitor was brighter, intense, and simply popped with image quality versus contemporary VGA displays. Unfortunately this was not possible since the RGB monitor was 9 pin versus 15 pin VGA, and the tube supposedly “did not support” these extra colors.
However, with much tweaking, I finally can do this–through shaders!
Further into the rabbit hole, I have 1440p slot mask working, which is essential for RGB. This will look better @ 4k some day, but for now, is as close as I can get.
Here’s Wing Commander on a emulated VGA display:
And here’s the same scene… on RGB!
Since I cannot use my real RGB monitor to test this, I’ll assume it is pretty close, as the RGB shader preset is looking great in every game I throw at it. Prior to moving to slot mask, there were always issues between games. I feel a shader preset is looking great when the preset looks great in everything.
The RGB display doesn’t do a great job with darker scenes, as it brightens them significantly, but this is to be expected since 16 color technology didn’t lend itself well to darker scenes, anyways, as one would discover playing 80s era PC games.
I think this is interesting, nonetheless.
Lastly, as a bonus, here are some 16 color games on my latest preset. I can’t wait to share the actual preset at some point in the future.
Even the prompt text is looking pretty close to my real monitor, despite the limitations of 1440. A couple of years ago this was impossible to reproduce.
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Samurai Shodown VI (Flycast Core) related question.
First of all, I greatly appreciate Mega Bezel Reflection Shader. I have never seen such crt simulation perfection before. It feels like the real thing.
I have no issues on any arcade games with mame_libretro core while using Mega Bezel Reflection Shader(MBZ__0__SMOOTH-ADV). However, I can’t setup this shader correctly for Samurai Shodown VI which uses flycast_libretro core.
I would be very happy if anyone who also plays this game could help me and point out the the settings that I should change.
Thank you.
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Please, a screenshot of what your seeing, and a description of what is wrong would get us to the answer more quickly than guessing.
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You are right. I’m uploading them right now.
As you can see, SamSho V has great scanlines and the large katana seems less jagged. Sadly SamSho VI doesn’t have horizontal scanlines and you can see the “characters” are pixelated. I know that the SamSho VI is a very different game and it’s background image seems cyrstal clear compared to character sprites.
Scanlines on SamSho V might seem wrong to you, it’s because I have set the shader for a 75" TV. It looks quite good on my screen.
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What’s going on here is that Samurai Showdown V is running in low-res native mode (~240p/Double-Strike) while Samurai Showdown VI is running in hi-res native mode (480p/VGA).
If you look at the image in Samurai Showdown VI you’ll see that there are in fact scanlines but there are many more, probably about double and the gaps between the scanlines are very fine.
It is these gaps which help reduce the jagged appearance of sprites which were designed with 240p resolution in mind or just low res graphics in general.
Compounding the issue is Scale FX/Super-XBR Smoothing seems to be active in those presets and they have less of an effect on hi-res graphics compared to low-res graphics.
So even though the sprites are low-res, the smooth algorithms are seeing them as hi-res and they’re not being smoothed. There’s a post somewhere on these forums by @Hyllian I believe, which explains and illustrates this phenomenon beautifully.
Based on my observation of the Samurai Showdown VI screenshot as well as other similar Dreamcast gamed.
The background seem to be rendered and upscaled differently from the character printed which seemingly remain untouched so probably some Bilinear or Nearest Neighbour upscaling was used for those for whatever reason. @hunterk had described this in the past as the sprites being “chunks or pixels” of was it “hunks of pixels”, whatever he said, the result is the smoothing algorithms missing them when it comes to filtering.
So you have a few options. The first is to force the game to run in low res mode using the core options. The result of that is that your sprites will look like the ones in Samurai Showdown V but all the pretty hi-res assets like fonts and the HUD are going to have a downgraded look.
The second option is to render internally at native res then use a D-Rez preset to downsample then output that to a lower resolution but that would also downsample your hi-res assets.
The third option is to use fake scanlines so you can apply the 240p scanlines to the 480p image.
Last, but not least is my favorite option, use a preset with (or adjust the preset so that it uses) a strong low to mid TVL CRT mask. The texture which the mask pattern adds to the image will also have the effect of taking away some of the harshness of the relatively unfiltered scanlines only image. Similar to the halftone effect used in magazines back in the day.
I have several examples of these in my preset packs. I’ll see if I can dig up some screenshots to add some illustration to my example.
This is an old example using a 1080p Optimized Preset at 1080p desktop resolution. If I find some newer ones I’ll update the post.
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Thank you.
I have tried the first option and run the game in half-res mode by using the core options. Mega Bezel Shader causes sprites to shatter as seen on screenshot. Now I will try the other methods and update this post.
SamSho VI must be a very painful game to emulate. I have never been able to make it look decent. If my question and these conversation pollute this post, I can happily stops asking in here and ask at wherever is more suitable.
Edit: I have applied you 2nd suggestion; D-Rez shader. In my opinion this is the best it could be. Yes the overall image quality dropped but it feels much better now to play. Thank you.
I’ll try fake scanlines as well. However, I couldn’t understand how to apply your last and favorite suggestion for now. I will read again and try to follow.
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You don’t have to understand right away. You can start by using the presets which I have created which already do everything I mentioned and more.
You can find them here:
I suggest you start with my CyberLab Neo-GX Ultra Presets which are in a folder in my CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack.
In my experience TurboGrafx-16/PC-Engine/Turbo Duo Presets also work well with Dreamcast Games.
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Hi you may want to try the DREZ present which keeps a larger horizontal resolution and downsamples the vertical resolution
Something like this might work MBZ__1__ADV__GDV__DREZ_X-VIEWPORT_Y-240p.slangp
Although we might want to make a 640x240 DREZ at some point.
Here are some examples with different DREZ presets:
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Hi, don’t know if it’s possible with megabezel or not, but is it possible to get a result like that :
My setup is with a vertical screen, so it’s not a problem to get that ratio.
You can check the reflection directly on that video (not mine, but it’s a french youtube channel that I watch time to time). I love the reflection arround the TV (and I now it’s ok to do), but the reflection on the megadrive would be neat 
Cherry on the cake, changing the cover of the box with the cover of the current game.
what do you think ? possible or not ?
note : I forgot the link to the video
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there is a similar Christmas version
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That’s nice. Need to think about how to make mine now. I have try but I’m using batocera, it’s a bit tricky to make it work on bato…
Thanks for the link
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The colors are finally correct. This process has been painful, but worth it! The Tandy CM-5 now looks really, really good in MegaBezel. I’ll have to work on the actual bezel looking like the real device next, possbly. We’ll see. The shader is color correct at last. I can’t wait to share.
The Tandy CM-5, despite the poor dot pitch, was truly the premier way to game in the 16 color PC era of the mid 80s. The monitor’s graininess and phosphor per-pixel brightness spike “shimmer” gave them an “arcade feel.”
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I have a quick question. The Scanline direction multiplier isn’t doing anything for me on retroarch 1.19.1, the most recent version it’s working on is the 1.16, any ideas why ?
The downsampling blur and opposite dir multiplier work as expected though.
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So I’d like to port my latest shader presets from 1.12 to 1.19.1, but I am running into problems. Banding moire patterns appear, for starters, as well as distorted brightness levels where the blacks become greys. Any pointers? I can supply screenshots in a bit.
Ideally I’d like them to look identical without tweaking anything, but alas, seems this is not possible.
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Could you post one of your presets? That could help me get an idea of what might be happening.
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Which preset are you using that you are seeing this? Also could you post a screenshot? This will give me an idea of what kind of content you are using if that might be part of it
Sure, here is one.
https://mega.nz/file/KI82DbKC#gN46kSf6TJk4R50Cy65iVTtt9tPpyDuoHzKldJGyFZw
Here’s another chain:
https://mega.nz/file/3V9SyCab#qgZWli-QDDLtH5DDPnfOYrO10c4p9zxLEKqkNyRoqpo
The first one shows resolution info text and not the game(Dosbox-Pure) with brightness amplified and the second simply crashes and refuses to operate.
Great shaders, thank you. I like seeing all the bezels you have to offer.
I’m using the MBZ_3_STD_GDV, but it actually does it in any other presets I’ve tried. I took 2 screenshots to illustrate, both with overlay and a different value to compare.
It’s still working on 1.16, but 1.17 up to the last version, the value doesn’t seem to apply.