Thanks! Looks amazing! You’re using some kind of xbr shader on this preset right? Games look so HD lol
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I appreciate the appreciation for my hours and hours of tweaking and reverse engineering trying to understand what effects the various settings have on the image one after the next mostly by trial and error! I’m also a big fan of these presets but I didn’t just make them for me, I made them so that others can enjoy the same wonderful experience that I’m experiencing.
That look is due to a combination of the different shader effects used and their parameters. My Composite - Pure preset doesn’t look blocky even though Scale FX is off. My other presets have it on though. GTU settings, core resolution resampling, sharpness settings, halation, deconvergence settings, downsampling blur settings and proper scanline alignment all work hand in hand to give these kind of results.
Have you found my post with my other presets yet? There are loads of screenshots and also video clips showing some of the older versions of these presets in action. Pay attention to the notes if you want to make the most of them.
Credit and thanks must also be directed to the talented individuals who worked hard to create the shaders themselves and also this great RetroArch project! People like @HyperspaceMadness, @guest.r, @Nesguy, @Duimon, @TheNamec and all the other contributors who made this possible!
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Yup! I got the presets and my mind is blown on how good this looks. It’s like the games got some kind of HD treatment or something. The preset + bezel is on a different level of detail. Thank you for all the amazing work you guys do!
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I’m playing with some settings on these presets and i noticed that some games with text certain letters look a bit faded/darker is this normal? I have a screenshot :
Pay attention to letter ‘X’ and 'K’
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Yes this is somewhat expected with the MDAPT, these areas are being identified as “dithering”. Tf you reduce the mdapt value it will use a more strict evaluation of what it should blend.
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Thanks a lot @HyperspaceMadness. Unfortunately there’s no one size fits all solution when it comes to dedithering and fake transparencies @ledoeye . There’s always a compromise somewhere. I tried to choose the setting that I think works best in most cases without causing too many artifacts and distractions due to false positives in my limited testing. The default is MDAPT = 2. You can also try 1 (Strict) or 0 (Off). I made a whole preset just for cases that benefit from 3 extensively like Sonic The Hedgehog and many Sega Genesis titles. Even Lords of Thunder for TurboGrafx-CD benefits from a setting of 3! I suggest whenever you spot a case where you’re noticing false positives as in this case, you can try adjusting that setting alone and save a Game Preset - problem solved!
On another note. What emulator are you using to play that game? If it’s Higan or BSNES you can also try switching your resolution to either 512 x 224 or 256 x 224 and see if the issue goes away but adjusting the MDAPT setting might be the best solution.
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Here’s a comparison shot with @Cyber DEATH TO PIXEL - ARCADE SHARP preset integration into my personal Mega Bezel Packs pipeline, compared to my own EXTREME (ScaleFX), ADVANCED and STANDARD presets.
DEATH TO PIXEL - ARCADE SHARP preset is the one I personally like the most in the package as it doesn’t feel heavy on eyes, COMPOSITE SHARP being too blurry to me!
To integrate Cyber DEATH TO PIXEL - ARCADE SHARP I completely removed my post-processing shader parameters and just kept bezel geometry/reflection information and textures. Then chained to MBZ__2__STD__GDV.slangp like Cyber did. Everything inside the CRT is like in the original CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Arcade Sharp.slangp.
@Cyber did a great job here! I don’t know if he’s using some specific real life display as a reference, but I think the visual experience feels pretty authentic and lovable for people who used to play on CRT TVs.
For my project I decided to go on enhancement, so I tend to prefer a shaper/detailed post-processing. Of course , in my experience results vary A LOT from a game to another. I feel Final Fight is a good benchmark as it has detailed, yet dated pixel graphics with a limited color palette.
WHAT I LIKE
- The grill/mask is really similiar to some IRL display screenshots I saw on r/crtgaming!
- Subtle deconvergence setting, bloom and halance… very very nice
- Quite a good downrez supersampling here, I didn’t notice ScaleFX by eye!
- On Haggar leg, you can notice the banding is absent if compared to my EXTREME profile
WHAT I WOULD IMPROVE
- The general blurriness takes some time getting used to, I had to push my chair away from display because of eyestrain. With some distance, it gets really good
- The blur really make some details disappear! You can notice on little wall bumps, Damnd trousers side seam and concrete texture
- Is there some color channel manual tuning? Looks like there’s a red/warm dominance
As I supposed, there’s a lot to learn from these researches!
Keep on with the good work man! 
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Thanks it’s fixed now!
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That’s great! Which setting worked for you?
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I appreciate your comments and will respond to the rest as soon as I can but something has to be amiss for your Arcade - Sharp screenshots to be looking so out of focus/blurry. I’m sure you’re not seeing that in my screenshots and video clips particularly my most recent ones. Are you? Are you using an older version of HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader? If so that could be the culprit. I also use a 4K display and do most testing at 4K.
This is how they look to me:
CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Composite - Sharp)
Final Fight - SNES
CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Arcade - Sharp)
Final Fight - Arcade
Wow! Thanks! This is great feedback. My reference display is all in my head though. I just tweak settings until I get something that I like basically. My influences would be everything CRT related that I’m exposed to now plus my memories and whatever looks good to me on my TV currently.
Yes, over time and after more extensive testing of some of my favourite games, these settings got lower and lower. After getting things really sharp I actually increased the halation a bit but most times less is more with these things. Another good example of this is curvature, where much less is more. Lol
Yes, I noticed this too. It was due to hours of trial and error and experimentation that seemed to work. I don’t usually push for upsampling or heavy smoothing in all directions at the same time nor go to the extreme with resolution. When I do, I always try to use other things like proper scanline alignment and masks in order to bring things back to that 8 or 16-bit look.
It’s a delicate balancing act and one of the reasons why I appreciate this generation of my presets so much compared to the previous generation with the fake scanlines where all lines were basically perfectly smooth.
Yes, less is more and there are many different settings which affect the blending of colours and pixels. Good results might be achievable by using small to medium amounts of multiple techniques/settings simultaneously as opposed to using a lot of one technique or two techniques/settings.
Most of settings are very subtle but they all add up and contribute to the final overall look and feel. For example, the tiny amount of deconvergence noise, even though you can hardly see it or notice it, it is doing something to the image that your mind can feel. Also look at my use of sharpness as an example.
That’s an anomaly that’s not present in my testing and usage with the standard HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader. My many screenshots and video clips also support this.
What can I say, maybe I’m such a super cool dude that if my pixels aren’t warm enough, I might freeze?!
Yes, we can all continue to learn from and build upon each other’s experiences and simple presets of course!
Thanks and same to you sir! Blessings.
For GBA games 0, looks so good man thanks!
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I’m on HSM_Bezel_Reflection_V 0.9.023_2021-09-11, the latest public release
I’m on a 1080p monitor with non-integer scaling for display bezels. Maybe this is the problem?
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I’m glad you got through! What you might find is that different games would be affected in different ways by the different settings. 0 is off so you might miss out on some colour blending and fake transparencies in some games. Don’t be afraid to experiment if you notice a particular scenario then save a per game preset.
It’s possible. I’ll test both of them out at 1080p and see.
First part of my testing.
CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Composite - Sharp) @ 1080p desktop resolution
Final Fight - SNES
CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Composite - Sharp) CRT Mask 7, CRT Mask Size 2 @ 1080p desktop resolution
Final Fight - SNES
Second part of my testing.
CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Arcade - Sharp) @ 1080p desktop resolution
Final Fight - Arcade
CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels (Arcade - Sharp) CRT Mask 7, CRT Mask Size 2 @ 1080p desktop resolution
Final Fight - Arcade
There’s a saying, “There’s no replacement for displacement”. While that may be true to some extent, in this case, while my presets at 4K are definitely a tad sharper than at 1080p out of the box, they aren’t anywhere near as blurry as what I’m seeing in your screenshot crop comparison where you can’t even see the scanlines anymore. This leads me to think that there may be something else that is softening up the image on your end.
With that said these tests along with your excellent shader preset screenshots have shown me that there can be some great gains and improvements to be had by further optimization of my presets for lower resolution displays. This is something that I will most likely continue working on in the near future! Thanks for the inspiration.
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With these settings things get way better on 1080p!!!
To me, problem is bezel size. These captures share the same post-processing settings, but look a little different in terms of sharpness…
Lord @HyperspaceMadness, any suggestion? Other than keeping piledriving poor thugs while pretending to do some tests? 
EDIT: replaced screenshots with Resolution Info
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You should have enabled Show Resolution Info for the screenshots with your bezels as well. My presets rely heavily on core sampling resolution so it could be that with a difference in bezel size and possibly resolution, somewhere along the line it’s affecting these resampling values/results.
You can also do some comparison tests using the standard HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader package just for reference as a sort of control.
On another note I said I would work on optimizing for 1080p. Well I just took my sharpest preset which is my Composite - Pure preset which doesn’t use Scale FX and turned off some of the composite look effects and combined it with these CRT Mask changes that I included in my tests above and man it looks really special! At 1080p! I guess my optimization work is done! I’ll post some screenshots at the end of this post in a bit.
Still, we should try to get to the root and try to understand the cause of the issue. I mean it doesn’t seem to affect your presets. I wouldn’t want to leave image quality on the table and would want all users to experience the presets in their best light as intended.
They don’t seem to be complaining.
Fixed in original post 
They can’t complain. They’re beautiful thanks to HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! (insert promo jingle here 
)
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Looking at your info, I’m wondering if due to the final screen size/resolution being lower compared to standard Mega Bezel, because there’s more downsampling needed to reach that lower resolution, there might also be more downsampling blur being applied. I tried to walk a very fine line with those downsampling blur settings but they’re optimized for the standard HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader and also 4K screens so anything outside of that can potentially lead to issues like these.
Besides that, I’ve noticed in my testing that deconvergence noise looks very different at different resolutions. My current settings are very low where that is concerned but that was tested at 4K. At lower resolutions the noise particles tend to get larger and “noisier” at the same settings. That can also be contributing to a loss of detail and resolution and even more so in the screenshots. With that said my current settings are extremely subtle to the point where it hardly even matters in screenshots at 4K.
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I think the main difference is probably that in the first image the screen is at vertical integer scale 4 and the later ones are about 3.5, so the scanlines will maybe not be as sharp.
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@HyperspaceMadness In fact, if I switch on integer scaling it gets way sharper.
@Cyber Nonetheless, I think with a little cranking it may get as good on 1080p as on those marvelous 4k screenshots!
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