Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

Yes when the shaders are updated the 5th option will become accessible in the parameters, and this will update for all existing presets.

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Okay understood. I was actually wondering if it might have caused some of the existing preset settings to be rearranged and needed to be updated but I guess it won’t in this case because it was just the 5th option that was inaccessible. Thanks a lot!

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First and foremost, thank you for making this. I stumbled across it last week, and I have not enjoyed emulation this much since first discovering Mame in 1998! I suck at artistic stuff but even I can make cool stuff with this.

I had a new issue start yesterday. GameCube is stuttering like mad in game with the shader on, no matter what settings or presets I have tried, both core and shader, and regardless of preset. Any idea what the problem may be? Apart from this, nothing else has had issues apart from PS2 no longer liking the glass shader which I don’t get!

Any idea where to troubleshoot?

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The PS2 core can only use the shader with the glcore driver. Are you using the glcore for the GameCube also?

What are your system specs? Are you using any internal resolution scaling?

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OK, switch from OpenGL to Vulkan, saved, exited, switch back to OpenGl, saved again, and it is working now. Something got out of whack there. Odd.

As for upscaling, I am running PS2 at 3x internal without issue. GC most games native as I have had mixed results with upscaling

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Yup. Almost exclusively use GLCore. i3 10th gen 3.6ghz base w/ GTS 1650 super. Should not have any issues

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Incidentally, the LED option is awesome. Light up the Tokyo Dome at night!

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If you want to upscale above 2x you should use the presets that have “HD” in the name, otherwise you risk crashing RA because of the ScaleFx pass.

Also I highly encourage you to use Vulkan with the Mega Bezel whenever possible. In my experience the performance is just better.

The next release of the Mega Bezel will not have HD presets, the Standard “STD” presets will have the same passes removed as the current HD. In addition @HyperspaceMadness has worked some magic so performance will no longer be an issue.

That being said, the next release is a ways out, so my advice still stands. :grin:


BTW. Did you add the Mega Bezel to an existing RA installation? If so and it works that is good, but existing configs can cause issues. I have always recommended using a clean install of RA.

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@HyperspaceMadness You’ve described how you apply the fake scanlines after there is some upscaling via resampling or rendering at a higher internal or higher than original resolution then downsampling and applying a slight horizontal blur in downsampling or something like that. This resulted in the wonderfully smooth upscaled images in the newpixie-clone_smoothed_rolling_scanlines_gdv_std and it’s derivatives, including my now older presets.

I noticed that the fake scanlines weren’t properly aligned like the regular scanlines though so I switched things up a bit and disabled the fake scanlines and now have the “real” scanlines. I really like the way things look now. I think these current presets kinda hit the sweet spot for me between smoothness and sharpness while maintaining a very high degree of authenticity but what if I also wanted to create an alternative preset or variant where I have the best of both worlds mainly for artistic purposes?

i.e. The smoothness of the antialising of the newpixie-clone smoothed and my old presets with the properly aligned scanlines instead of fake scanlines. Is that possible? Maybe there’s a way to precalculate the proper positioning of the fake scanlines based on the coordinates of the “real scanlines” or precalculate the fake scanlines before upscaling?

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There is the “Int Scale Scanlines” parameter that will start the scanlines in the proper alignment , but once they start “rolling”, they won’t stay that way. (How could they?)

Maybe I’m not understanding. Are you asking for some kind of XBR filtering?

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I don’t really want or need them to roll. I just wanted to know if I can get identical smoothing (basically an identical look) to my old presets but with properly aligned scanlines. This isn’t because I don’t like the way things look now but I would have liked to be able to have an improved version of the old look to keep in my presets library mainly for artistic purposes.

For my purposes the current look is what I will continue to use as my daily driver but the old one also has a really nice artistic aesthetic that I wouldn’t mind having around and improving upon by removing the rolling scanlines and having properly aligned scanlines instead. So I don’t miss it but I would still like to have something like that in my preset library.

Remember I’m still a noob eh. Lol I can’t tell you what XBR filtering is without doing some research to see what it looks like and means. I’m sure I might have come across and tried at least one preset with it a very long time ago though as I’m quite familiar with the term itself.

I know about 2xSai, Scale Fx and there was another one in ZSNES back in the day like 2xSai. I’m sure a Google search can reveal but sometimes I like to give the memory a lil workout like people did in the old days.

I’ll show you an example:

This is from my new Composite - Sharp preset

This is from my old one

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Thank you for all the tips! I am going to do some toying with things to optimize further. I did use an existing RetroArch install, though I cleared out option files and cfgs for the consoles (and their respective games).

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That is good.

BTW. I like your graphic. It is nice to see an alternative use for the LED layer.

I am still toying with the idea of adding a night lite in the outlet of my IBM 5150 series. (If I can find an example lite from the era.)

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I don’t think so, that’s why I don’t like xbr etc.

I guess you could try a version that only smooths horizontally, but I think it’s going to look weird.

The smoothing options in GDV are very comprehensive.

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Thanks! You may like what I am going for here then. WIP and I am not happy with the left portion of the background and the bezel is too green, so it needs work, but I imagine you could take this concept further and have “holographic” floating images. This was just proof of concept to see if it worked and it did: https://youtu.be/qTTleM_NasE

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That’s a pretty good idea. It seams to me that with two different image layers you could composite a left and right eye graphic and actually get a 3D image. (You might have to use a third base layer with a 2D image and use additive blending on the two top layers.) With a background that had some DOF it could get pretty cool.

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But what if it precalculates the scanlines and has the correct coordinates for them based on the non-resampled original image resolution 1st, then did the upscaling and whatever downsampling and used the same scanlines and positioning that had been precalculated?

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Yeah this is an option which I could add. Right now if you turn off int scanlines and set the Scanline Resolution to the cropped res vertical resolution you should get something similar to this (although I’m not sure if the scanlines will be exactly aligned to the pixels. You would be able to check this by turning scalefx off.)

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I’m so confused.

I’ve set everything as it says to - Aspect Ratio is set to Full, Rotation is Normal, Integer Scale is off. But I just always have issues, especially when trying to use the Duimon set (but not limited to that). Sometimes the back bezels will be upside-down. And with Pacman on FB-Neo as an example, the duimon arcade/fb-neo bezel is turned to the side and no amount of fiddling seems to rectify it.

Is there something I’m missing or misunderstanding? I tried doing a bit of a search fo the thread(s) but tbh a forum is a pretty bad (unintuitive perhaps is more appropriate) way of chasing down old bugs, searching for “arcade” or “upside-down” or “sideways” gives the tineiest snippets of conversations that seem almost impossible to navigate and keep track of.

I’d really love to work this out.

Is there any possibility of an FAQ/Common Issues/Solutions page for the github repo perhaps?

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The “Upside Down” can be solved by using the “Flip Viewport Vertical” parameter.

It is a side effect of RA sending a flipped frame buffer to the shader system on some hardware rendered cores. If you are using my graphics that correspond to the core, they should already have the parameter activated. If you are mixing and matching, you will need to set it manually.

FB-Neo is a special case and HSM is working on a fix. (If it is possible I’m sure he will make it happen.)

For now it will start out in the default horizontal aspect using the horizontal background.

(The shader handles switching the backgrounds.)

Make sure you have “Vertical Mode” selected in the FB-Neo core settings.

Then, in the shader parameters, rotate the CRT.

The shader rotates the tube and automatically uses the vertical background.

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