Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

[SixWingedFreak]

g_gamma_out = 2.22 g_signal_type = 0 g_crtgamut = -1 g_space_out = -1 wp_temperature = 6600

Those help a ton, thank you! Seems most of it was due to the white balance, I would have never tried that param. I actually prefer the “without” screen you posted above; “with” leans too much into blue, with the healthbars looking a smidge green. Regardless I appreciate the help!

I had been getting complaints about banding on the highlight image all the way along.

That’s surprising, it was actually gorgeous for me before! Only the slightest bit of banding if I’d search really hard. When the screen is completely black it helps give it some depth imo, without it on a pure black screen looks too flat and lifeless.

Previous version is on the top here, current on the bottom.

[guest.r]

@Axymeus

Did anyone find an easy way to remove the scanlines?

Under interlacing options, “Interlace Trigger Resolution” can be lowered to trigger interlacing, which doesn’t produce scanlines. To get a flicker-free image “Interlace Mode” 4.0 is best used.

[c9f5fdda06]

Nerdy correction: color temp should be 6504 (D65)

[HyperspaceMadness]

So do you think the default grade color temp should be 6500 for the Mega Bezel?

I had set it at 7000 because it seemed better in some quick eyeballing tests

[Tarrasque]

I’m doing some experimentations with the examples. At the moment I’m trying to edit the Orionsangel/SuperMetroid.slangp preset with some other bezel images I have.

As a first experiment, I’m trying to make a vertical bezel. So I just substituted the referenced images:

ScreenPlacementImage = 1943.png
BackgroundImage = 1943.png
TopLayerImage = 1943.png

Then somethign weird happens. If I load the modified preset over an horizontal game, such as Black Tiger, the image is visible (though not correctly positioned, of course).

If I load it over a vertical game such as 1943 the image is not visible at all (I only see the shader generated border and reflections).

[HyperspaceMadness]

Could you post some screenshots?

Sorry, I realized it’s that you need to set the

BackgroundVertImage rather than BackgroundImage

Basically when the screen is horizontal it uses BackgroundImage, and when the screen is vertical BackgroundVertImage is used

[Tarrasque]

Thanks. It’s very impressive.

The #reference language directive makes the per-game presets very concise. And the magic shader screen/frame auto resize feature is wonderful.

I’m delving in the files a little bit and then if I have time I’ll try to make up some script tool to bulk create shaders presets for each bezel overlay I have.

[HyperspaceMadness]

You might be interested in this, it’s what I use to assemble the base Mega Bezel presets

Mega Preset Assembler

Hi All, I made a python script which assembles presets to ease the process of putting together presets. Basically normally to add extra passes to a preset you need to edit the numbers of all subsequent passes by hand which is really irritating and sometimes error prone. The way it works is you put your preset shaders that you want to assemble somewhere relative to the script, then in the root folder where the python file is you create a .protoslangp file which just has references to those pre…

[Tarrasque]

I’ll surely look into it, thanks.

[Axymeus]

Interesting, it does remove the scanlines under a certain resolution, but it also smooth out the picture, a kind of pastel like effect.

Looking in closer it seems like there is still a grid effect due to the emulated LCD grid (sorry I have no words for most of those things haha). Maybe it’s best to show you what’s troubling me.

Here is a plain blue background with the shader on, looks about what you’d expect.

But I’m using a 4K display, and when I record in 1080p of course the downscaling crushes the effect but more precisely introduces this RGB vertical banding

I would like to be able to turn off the effect precisely that’s causing this. Sorry for the inconvenience

[HyperspaceMadness]

What you are seeing is ScaleFX which is on by default in all the Mega Bezel presets, so scroll to near the bottom of the parameter list to scalefx which is just above grade I think and turn it off

so in the preset set

HSM_SCALEFX_ON = 0

This will remove the smoothing on the pixel art, or if you really want something raw sharp pixels you can use

HSM_CRT_ORIGINAL_AB_COMPARE_ON = 1
HSM_CRT_ORIGINAL_AB_COMPARE_SPLIT_POSITION = 100

This will give you the raw pixels

[Axymeus]

Hmm yes ScaleFX was the culprit for the smoothing effect. But unfortunately it doesn’t alleviate the banding effect from the downscaling. And using compare mode removes the problem but also removes a couple neat things that I’d like to keep like the color grading and the shadow around the edges. Maybe there isn’t a way to only remove this effect.

[HyperspaceMadness]

You may also want to set the mask in guest-dr-venom to 0 or -1 (I forget) to remove the mask

Can you post images of before and after you downscale? I’m curious where the banding is coming from

[Axymeus]

The two plain blue pictures above are exactly that. The first is a capture of RetroArch and the second the same but through OBS. This is probably a limitation of the downscaling algorithm they are using, but I don’t think another algorithm would perform any better.

[HyperspaceMadness]

Ok, but I would expect with the interlace 4 you would have no scanlines

I think you need to reduce the interlace threshold, and set the fake scanlines to 0 as well

HSM_INTERLACE_TRIGGER_RES = 200
HSM_FAKE_SCANLINE_OPACITY = 0
HSM_SCALEFX_ON = 0
shadowMask = -1

here it is without changing anything

And here it is with the trigger res lowered and scalefx off

[Duimon]

@Tarrasque

I’m delving in the files a little bit and then if I have time I’ll try to make up some script tool to bulk create shaders presets for each bezel overlay I have.

One of the first things I did here, while starting my graphics for the Mega Bezel, was create a set of scripts to convert TheBezelProject overlays to Mega Bezel presets.

They are seriously out of date but shouldn’t require much work to bring up to speed.

One of the features is to set the color of the Bezel and Frame according to a color use percentage in the existing art. (Although this step can be skipped.)

I am AFK right now but you can get the link to my repo on my thread. (Link to my thread is in the top post here.)

[Axymeus]

Ah yes it was shadowMask that was creating the banding on downscaling, now it works as you’d expect thank you!

[Tarrasque]

Thanks. I’ll look at them too.

I also shared some scripts here. Mostly they were focused on bulk editing existing bezels to better fit my likes.

For example, I really like OrionsAngels bezels, but for my tastes (ad bad eyesight) the viewport of a full 16:9 bezel on my laptop’s screen is too little, so I made tools to stretch the bezels so that the viewport is maximized, onfortunately cropping out part of the bezel art.

[Duimon]

@Tarrasque

I also shared some scripts here.

I am no expert at scripting. My hope has always been that someone with real skill could take what I’ve done and make it something actually worth sharing. If you read the old posts, written while I was creating them, you’ll see I almost didn’t release them.

[Tarrasque]

Hey, that’s the whole point of contributing!

Some have programming skills, some have graphic skills, some have little of either but lots of enthusiasm so they can help with housekeeping, documentation, data entry…