Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

[Duimon]

@mr_blastman

still I see a fair bit of excessive “smoothing” going on compared with my old standby from the Analog Shader Pack v. 3 - Nanao Soft.

Since you mentioned the analog shader pack, are your comments about the default Mega Bezel output, or Cyber’s presets?

[Tromzy]

Last time I tried OpenLara a few months ago, Tomb Raider 1 was playable, I played the first 3 levels without any problems. But Tomb Raider 2/3/4 were not, I remember triggers not working in TR2 for example.

[Dennis1]

Duckstation unfortunately crashes in Retroarch when activating the shader. But the PSX Beetle HW Core works with the shader. It needs some tweaking with the aspect ratio etc.

Here is a screenshot of Tekken 3:

[mr_blastman]

They are about turning on interlacing to simulate alternating scanline patterns, sorry, I should have quoted the original post, and were using original presets I believe, albeit heavily tweaked on my part.

[Duimon]

@mr_blastman

turning on interlacing to simulate alternating scanline patterns

I haven’t used the interlacing parameters much, except to turn off the scanlines. I don’t care much for the results, but it is a Guest.r feature so it belongs.

[Cyber]

@mr_blastman

I tried this, thanks. Neat. Something feels a little off, though, with how interlacing is handled. When scenes are still I see a fair bit of excessive “smoothing” going on compared with my old standby from the Analog Shader Pack v. 3 - Nanao Soft. The second oddity is how the image is “broken” into blurred scanlines in areas of movement. Super Contra is a good example of where I have observed this with the machine gun fire and becomes very apparent by level 2. Using Nanao Soft in pre-slang Retroarch, however, there is no such issue, yet that shader heavily relies on interlacing as well.

I grew up with CRT televisions and there was no such issue with motion. There was never any “separation into scanline blur zones.” What did exist, though, is a pseudo-faux smoothing around the edges of objects and zones due to the blur of the alternating scanlines from the interlacing–that I could always see. Maybe this is due to how I have retroarch running? I’ll have to try some tweaks that I had to do with my dos exclusive 32 bit version to ensure the refresh rate was at a stable 60 fps.

Perhaps @guest.r and @Nesguy might be able to chime in and assist here?

[guest.r]

@mr_blastman

The second oddity is how the image is “broken” into blurred scanlines in areas of movement. Super Contra is a good example of where I have observed this with the machine gun fire and becomes very apparent by level 2. Using Nanao Soft in pre-slang Retroarch, however, there is no such issue, yet that shader heavily relies on interlacing as well.

You can use interpolation modes (4 or 5) if you don’t want some interlacing effects. How the analogue pack presets work is quite interesting though if you know around with shaders.

[HyperspaceMadness]

One thing to note is that the Mega Bezel base presets have Interlace interpolation mode set to 4 which will remove the interlacing effect.

This is because a lot of content which has a higher vertical resolution (number of scanlines) isn’t actually interlaced, so I wanted to avoid interlacing being applied to stuff that isn’t interlacing content. It also enables being able to easily turn ScaleFx on/off and increase sampling resolution (which increases the number of scanlines) and have consistent behavior.

If you want interlacing, as guest.r says you can choose a mode other than 4 or 5

[Cyber]

@Dennis1

Good luck with the repair mate !

Thanks a lot! I have no choice but to learn here.

@Dennis1

Here you can see what the CRT Brightness setting does. The bright parts (here the white Text and the sword of Leonardo) glow stronger without the Blooming / halo effect which the other settings in the shader cause and I can see on your example here too.

@Dennis1

I have set it to 200 instead of the default value of 100. The phosphor dots just pop more with increased values.

This setting is profound! I tried it today and loved the initial results. Later I’ll use it to improve my presets!

Thanks for sharing your findings!

Open question to anyone:

What’s the best and most non-destructive setting I should use to get rid of a very slight red cast and also make the yellow a hint greener?

Update: Turning Deconvergence On with Deconvergence Smoothing disabled actually did the trick.

[Dennis1]

To alter the colors you have the option “CRT Profile” under the submenu “Color Tweaks”. And also the setting called “CRT Phosphor Gamut” under the submenu “Signal and Color Space”.

And don’t forget the “White Point” where lower values like 6500K look warmer and higher values cooler. You have also advanced settings like “Hue vs Saturation” and various “Tint” options for RGB.

You can tweak the colors endlessly in the shader, but there is a big chance that you screw them too, if you dont know what you are doing.

At the moment I have the CRT Phosphor Gamut @ NTSC-J, and the White Point @ 7500K as I like the slightly cooler CRT Look without the red cast as you mentioned too.

[Nesguy]

I recommend using 0 for the phosphor (no phosphor profile) and using the color temp control in GDV. Pretty sure the phosphor gamuts in grade need a wide color gamut in order to look accurate, otherwise you just get a lot of clipping.

[Cyber]

I understand the why but don’t you think it seems a bit random and slightly confusing that there are so many different places you can adjust the colour settings which may affect the image in similar ways. Hence my question, “…which is the best and most non-destructive way?” It would be nice to have some recommendations for noobs like myself to feel a bit guided (safer, more confident) as to which set of controls are the ones that are recommended by the experts for doing this, that or the other.

Looking forward to the HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader Illustrated Guide Book! Lol

[HyperspaceMadness]

Yeah the randomness comes from joining different shaders together and trying not to mess each up too much when they have overlapping feature sets.

Basically the Guest Dr Venom Crt Shader has some color features Grade is a color correction shader in the shader chain which has a lot of advanced features and lots of parameters.

So if you want something much simpler to start with you can just turn off Grade and only use the stuff in the [ COLOR TWEAKS ] section which are the guest color parameters

In a previous incarnation of the shader I had disabled the some features so that there was only one version of a particular feature set, e.g. color temp & phosphor gamut. This really didn’t turn out very well as people who were looking for standard things in Guest Dr Venom couldn’t find them, and the param values from a user’s setup of the default guest dr venom couldn’t be easily applied to the Mega Bezel.

Right now Grade is on by default, Perhaps I should add a switch for the Guest Color settings and turn them off by default. And also label the guest color stuff with Guest-DrVenom in the title header

[Cyber]

Thanks! Glad to see you here.

How do you properly take advantage of Scanline Type 2.00?

It makes everything look so sharp, clear, well defined and contrasty but so dark at the same time. When I look at the distance between the individual phosphors and the thickness of the scanlines and mask separating them, I can fully understand why. It doesn’t affect my Arcade Sharp PVM Edition and RGB Sharp PVM Edition presets so much because they have a little bit of halation that compensates for it. My presets with lower halation levels don’t fare as well. I’ve tried cranking the CRT Gamma Correct, also the CRT Brightness and also the CRT Gamma in and out but I could still see those black spaces in between the phosphors preventing them from hitting the brightness and lightness of shade that I was looking for. I eventually gave up and settled for scanlines type 1.00. Do you know any tricks?

[Cyber]

@HyperspaceMadness

Right now Grade is on by default, Perhaps I should add a switch for the Guest Color settings and turn them off by default. And also lable the guest color stuff with Guest-DrVenom in the title header

I don’t mind things the way they are. Was just wondering which section of controls was the one someone like yourself for example would’ve recommended as the primary one for making adjustments where functionality might overlap.

I wouldn’t want to turn off Grade or Guest Colour settings and lose any of their benefits but I know you would know what makes the most sense. Just wanted to know what’s the wisest and most sensible place to work in each area where there are functionality overlaps as a sort of hierarchical list of recommendations.

I think your stuff is perfection the way it functions and the way it’s put together! I currently manage without asking too many questions by trial and error but I’m still new to this so sometimes I just wonder if I’m doing things in the most optimal way.

Thanks so much again to you, @guest.r and all other contributors for making these great tools, toys and masterpieces of art!!

[HyperspaceMadness]

@Cyber

I wouldn’t want to turn off Grade or Guest Colour settings and lose any of their benefits but I know you would know what makes the most sense. Just wanted to know what’s the wisest and most sensible place to work in each area where there are functionality overlaps as a sort of hierarchical list of recommendations.

I think in general you probably want to use one set of color parameters or the other, otherwise you have two things trying to do very similar color transforms at the same time which will likely be quite confusing

[Faolon]

Hi everybody!

I recently found these shaders and really love them! There is just one problem i can’t seem to solve, so maybe somebody here can help me out.

I normally use the newpixie crt shader, so i was really glad when i saw, that it was integrated with this shader. However I can’t for the live of me get MBZ__1__ADV__NEWPIXIE to look like…well…newpixie.

Here are two screenshtots comparing newpixie to the shader mentioned above:

I played around with colours, contrast, etc but didn’t get it to look “right”. If somebody could point me in the right direction, that would be great

[HyperspaceMadness]

I think this might just be a different gamma, you can try adjusting the CRT Gamma:

CRT Gamma Out (Linear to Gamma Space Encode)

I also think the horizontally smeared bloom is not working properly either…

[Cyber]

@HyperspaceMadness

I think in general you probably want to use one set of color parameters or the other, otherwise you have two things trying to do very similar color transforms at the same time which will likely be quite confusing

Okay, I understand. Don’t go around making too many drastic changes to the recipe because of a noob like me though, unless it’s for a bug or much better way to do something. Lol

My presets are like an intricately stacked house of cards at the moment. I just need to learn and understand these tools some more and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ve basically been leaving the unknown sections alone and moving to them one by one, not necessarily randomly but just as a part of the learning and evolution process in addition to feedback and other influences.

I’ve reached to a point where everything is sort of just coming together both in my understanding as well as in the final product and it’s a great feeling!

I’m actually helping other users improve their emulation experience! Have you seen my latest concoctions?

Much thanks again!

[Faolon]

Thank you so mich for the quick reply!

Adjusting CRT Gamma Out definitely helps Something is still going on with the black outlines though. It’s especially easy to see on the flowersfrom the screenshots from my inital post.