Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

Oh, The things that you mentioned is what I saw on crt-royale kurozumi shader.

Fortunately I didn’t find any problem with guest-dr-venom standard presets.(or just lucky so far?)

But Anyway the benefits of 4K seems obvious, so I’ll prepare 4k monitor and VGA.

And I’m already using Duimon’s presets. combination of HSM Mega Bezel and Duimon’s Overlay Is stunning!

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Yeah, Royale has the most problems with these issues because of how it is designed. It’s one of the reasons I decided to remove it from the Mega Bezel (as well as the difficulty maintaining it)

GUEST-DrVENOM has much fewer issues like this so it’s a great choice :).

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Hi everyone - this shader pack is a BLAST! holy cow… i can put my 34kv now into the basement for other projects… any advice on how to set this beauty up for a LG cx9 4k tv? i see a lot of dotmatrix scanlines on the screenshots - couldnt find those in the settings…gotta dig deeper.

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Not sure there is anything particular, except make sure you are outputting 4K, otherwise you will get blurryness. You can also use the Glass preset if you are concerned about burn in on the sides.

Not sure what you mean about dot matrix scanlines… Maybe you mean an LCD screen for handhelds like the GBA?

If so you just want the LCD preset which is in the Base_CRT_Presets folder

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Hi all, I am looking at Guest’s new Guest-DrVenom advanced shader.

Let me know if you are interested in me updating the Guest-DrVenom in the Mega Bezel to this new version. Keep in mind that this would replace the version which is currently there.

You can like this post to let me know if you are interested in this.

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Hi I really like your shaders but is it possible to just apply the background image and nothing else? Like instead of having black bars on each side I just want something that covers them and makes it all look nice? Disabling all of the CRT filters and just leave the games at 8x internal res with FXAA.

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Ohh I’d love to mess with this!

Also, and I know you hear it all too often, but thank you and the people working on this because it’s really something special. I came back after 2 years from when I’d begun building a little setup to play my old games, life got in the way and coming back to it all this week has been a breath of fresh air, and then some, finding this incredible Shader suite.

I actually have been putting it through it’s paces, trying to get as much as possible running via RetroArch, and right now, I’m up to my gamecube games, using the Dolphin core in RA. Something I’ve noticed with HSM and this core is that, it seem to be auto adjusting the aspect ratio quite a lot, with no clear way (least not for myself, I’m a bit green to all of this) to stop it. I think whatever it issue is, is also linked to some of the visual graphic glitches i’m seeing on screen, because when I turn off the HSM shader, I don’t get any of these issues on the RA Dolphin core.

Is this something you’ve experienced before? Trying to tick off things I can do to narrow down what I may have done to cause this myself, but appreciate any help/expertise from the good folks here.

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Are you using the plain shader or my presets?

Either way you can change the aspect in the shader parameters. For the Game Cube, since it is a higher resolution system you may get more moire. You can adjust the scanline direction multiple and/or turn on integer scaling for the vertical axis.

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Hi, so you can set the

[ CRT vs ORIGINAL A/B COMPARE ]

  • Compare ON
  • Splitscreen Position

To 1 and 100

This will give you just the raw pixels :slight_smile:

Hey, so I was using the n64 preset (as it actually happened with n64 games too) and when I tried a plain preset, the shaking stopped. I turned on the on screen info and it looks like it was the sample res constantly adjusting itself, creating a “shaking” feeling.

It isn’t shaking now on the plain shader presets (in the root folder of HSM shaders), however there’s still some artefacts appearing in game (Die Hard: Vengeance was my test for this) on screen, only when using the shader, not when running the game shader free.

Ah, so I think this is the crop black option which is on in the N64 preset. It’s meant to crop only black around the edges to avoid the letterboxing that happens on Mario 64 for example. If you change the cropping to not do this the problem will go away. You can also reduce the black threshold so it doesn’t trigger on stuff that isn’t absolutely black

Can you post some screenshots of the artifacts you are seeing?

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Sorry I’m new to this but where can I find this? I didn’t see anything similar on the shader options menu and I didn’t see that line on the file either.

Edit: nvm I found it thank you!!

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The crop black option was indeed the culprit! I’ve fixed the “shaking” now from that, thank you so much.

The visual glitch which only tends to appear when using HSM, I’ve not been able to catch a screenshot of, since it only happens during motion, so I recorded a tiny video, hope that’s OK, shows the shader on and the artefacting, then the shader off, with no artefacts. You can see it here.

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Thanks for the video, that really helps me!

I see the issue, this is one I haven’t seen before.

Try turning off the anti-flicker parameter, that’s my first guess at what might be causing it.

Thanks! On the contrary, we can never hear this too often! It’s great to hear when this thing helps bring some joy :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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The anti-flicker worked! Wonderful. I’ve n64 and GameCube up and running now, looking wonderful in the HSM presets ^^

Pretty much been able to get everything else running via RA, besides PCSX2 - it just seems to not run in RA, even with the right video render set: tried glcore and d3d11 both turn up failed to load content, and I believe I’ve the correct bios in place. They seem to run in the standalone PCSX2 just fine, though.

The reason I bring this up is, has anybody had success in combining ReShade and these Shaders? My thought would be, since I can’t get RA to run PS2 games atm, I can use PCSX2, with ReShade, and combine these shaders (I feel like I’m saying reshade, ???, profit here since I don’t know how difficult or impossible that may be) to get the same beautiful HSM output I’m getting for every other platform so far… is this doable?

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Thanks for confirming this, I’ll probably turn off anti-flicker by default since it can create this kind of artifact when used in a 3D game.

A number of people have gotten PCSX2 running, so it might be something with your setup. Try a fresh install of Retroarch just in case.

I would recommend continuing to work on getting PXSX2 working in Retroarch.

Reshade is a whole new system, and the only way to get the Mega Bezel running in it would be to port the whole thing to Reshade which would be a huge amount of work, and certainly won’t be happening any time soon by me :wink:

Hi I realized that I never answered this. if you are still getting the aspect ratio changing when it’s unexpected could you post what the debug text looks like so I can see what the resolution is? This will help me improve the auto aspect ratio.

To work around if the aspect ratio is wrong set your aspect ratio to explicit, or one of the predefined ratios instead of auto and it will stay stable.

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In the spirit of updating past my initial queries, I thought I would just drop this in.

I’ve been sitting for a while on how to get past that “Failed to load content” issue, and I actually just now, went into the cores folder, removed the pcsx2 dll (and a .dll.zip of the same file name? Not sure what that is) dropped this: https://github.com/aliaspider/pcsx2/releases/tag/v0.1-libretro in, ran RA and ran a PS2 ISO. And it just worked. Loaded the HSM shader without a hitch, and I’m chasing apes with a net who have flashing red lights on their noggins, I couldn’t be happier :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Hoping this may help anybody else who is going through the RA PS2 journey and maybe hasn’t quite found the right away about it. I followed all the usual guides (using the binary build of pcsx2 etc, getting the right bios) but I’m just happy to confirm I’ve finally got this working with this little process above.

The aspect ratio thing was the black cropping issue actually, I should have really clarified that it was the same issue I’d just explained it differently on two occasions, sorry! Consider all my concerns quashed!

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Hey @HyperspaceMadness, can you tell if there is any really significant difference in performance and features with this new shader? Visually I didn’t see any major changes.

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Performance wise I am getting on RTX 2060 at 4K with the ADVANCED preset:

  • Old Guest-DrVenom ------------------------ 80fps
  • New Guest-DrVenom-Advanced ----- 76fps

Feature wise it’s definitely an improvement, the interlacing options are better. There is also a slight blur that you can add which does a nice softening on the scalefx stuff or high res input.

It has deconvergance & noise

Afterglow has been corrected to work with brightened black so you can get scanlines on black and afterglow

The Glow should be more consistent than past versions, there are also some scanline pixel smoothing stuff which is better as well. Better organization & control of the Glow, Bloom, Brightness

It will have the color options put back in (Color Space, Color Profile, Temperature, Saturation & LUTs (This stuff is obviously in Grade, but this is much more accessable since it’s much fewer parameters, and Grade is really for the tweakers)

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Mega Bezel is updated to V 0.9.013 2021-05-30

Changes:

  • Guest-DrVenom Advanced
    • Guest-DrVenom updated to Guest-DrVenom Advanced!!!
    • Additional Guest features added to other CRT shaders, e.g. interlacing, deconvergence
    • Added Threshold where afterflow appears
  • Turned OFF Anti-Flicker by default
  • Decreased Scale Increment for Cabinet Glass
  • Added BASIC-BORDER-EXTRA-PASSES preset
    • Added Max-Int-Scale__BASIC-EXTRA-PASSES in Variations folder
    • Has the scaling and extra image processing of the Mega Bezel but no Bezel or Reflection
    • No Curvature, uses integer scale and will scale to slightly larger than the screen
  • Resolution Debug Info
    • Fixed errors in rounding in resolution debug info
      • This should now report the correct screen size and integer multiples
    • Added text to show which base preset type is loaded
    • HDCore presets or other presets where there is resolution reduction in the first pass this is reported properly
  • Added MBZ__3__BASIC-BORDER-WITH-REFLECT__EASYMODE
    • Good for low spec systems, uses 1/3 less processing than Guest-DrVenom counterpart
  • X Position offset added to ADVANCED presets
  • Added Brightness parameter to the gamma in and out to adjust brightness after the CRT pass, should be helpful for things like vector games
  • Grade
    • Updated to latest version from 2020-11-20
    • This fixes the darkening which seemed to be happening before
    • Added On/Off Switch
    • Removed the LUT options from Grade since Guest’s LUT is now included
    • Removed Vignette since we already have a vignette in the Mega Bezel

Max-Int-Scale__BASIC-EXTRA-PASSES preset

Smoothing Examples

No Smoothing

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Increased Horizontal sampling

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Increased Horizontal sampling with some downsample blur

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Increased Vertical sampling

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Note: @duimon has mentioned that grade vignette doesn’t affect the overall brightness whereas the mega bezel does, so I will probably update the mega bezel vignette to keep the overall brightness

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