Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

As someone with a 2017 laptop (i7-7700HQ) and a GTX 1050 (4mb), and just playing @ 1080, I can attest that there are a few Mega Bezel presets around that will bog me down even with the 1050. Mainly I think ones that use tilt , or if emulating a later gen system with an ADV preset. I don’t generally dig under the hood of the preset and mess with much, or I could probably manage better performance on some.

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Hi. Everything is perfect now except gamma, I’m struggling with it. I have game gamma 1.4 and gun gamma 1.4, do I Have to use scanline gamma and mask gamma 1.4 as well? Also do I have to use gamma correction as well or leave it 1.00?

This is the result…

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I really like that result! Maybe you can freeze it right there, give it a nice name and continue your work on a new variation/version so as to preserve where you’re reached up to this point? At some point down the road you might look back and say hmmm, maybe I don’t need this one again anymore but it’s not always easy to do that immediately.

Then there are things like eye and mental fatigue that can kick in when working on these things for too long and you can find yourself either going around in circles or actually messing up a masterpiece.

What are you struggling with? Isn’t the Gamma where you want it to be? How does it look to you? Due to the nature of HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader being made up of a collection of shaders and not just one shader from different sources, you might have some duplication of functionality.

So you know what I do, I don’t let it bother or confuse me, I use what I need to use. I read different things, then try different things. When Post CRT Brightness came out, I was all over it, pushing it up until I saw things I didn’t want to see then backing off. Then I remember reading Guest talk about getting interesting results by setting both CRT Gamma In and Out to 1 so I tried that as well and many other combinations in between.

Before that, I was only using Gamma_C for my brightness and Gamma adjustments. Then for a while I stopped. Then I read Guest talking about using Gamma_C as the main tool for brightness/gamma adjustment and guess what? It’s my main tool once again but I didn’t erase what I did from before with CRT Gamma In/Out and Post CRT Brightness, I instead built on top of my experiences with those because if you experiment enough, over time and by observation, you get to learn more about how things work and what results can be expected along with the knowledge gained from theoretical explanations of their functions.

So it’s like cooking and having all the ingredients one could possibly imagine. You have to know how to mix a little from here with a little from there to get things looking the way they should and not be overwhelmed by choice.

I’ve heard so much about brightboost and brightness controls yet I don’t interfere with them. I’ve used halation in the past, I don’t any more. I don’t use Glow, except in my SNES presets where I experimented with it set to 0.01.

Many times less is more with these things and many of them have side effects if overused.

So keep up the good work and continue experimenting, observing, reading, asking questions and learning.

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Thanks, I like the result, the pattern I can say it’s perfect, it’s exact as my CRT at last… I’ve saved it, the pattern setting is the defenitive one, as i’m really satisfied in this sense.:grin:

Yes, that’s the point. I think after hours looking both different screens, it gets to a point where you can’t see clearly​:rofl:. After a while of resting, I look at the screen shot and it looks really good, but now I will play with colour and post brightness. These are the only things that I doubt a bit, but now I don’t need to touch other settings. And With gamma I doubt, maybe because of fatigue as you mentioned before. At the moment I will leave gamma, and play with post brightness and see what happens. :smiley:

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You can take a look at this post from just yesterday which contains a group of posts talking about some of the settings you mentioned there. You can search the forums as well as his thread for even more:

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Mask gamma only works with masks, which aren’t on full strength and mask bloom. Lower values bring a more coarse look (greater mask contrast).

You can leave scanline gamma at the default value unless you want more pronounced scanlines and a more darkish look.

Gamma correct is very usefull if the brightness loss in darker areas is too big. Then you can crank it up a bit.

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Here scanlines gamma is at 1.75. it looks like my crt. :smiley:. Thanks for your help😃

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From the interwebs…

Nice SharkaBytes video showing TheNamec’s cyberpunk Amiga and some groovy Amiga demoscene content

Fun video OTG Gaming did on using shaders in Retroarch, with some really nice things to say about the Mega Bezel, Duimon’s and Soqueroeu’s packages near the end. Thanks OTG Gaming :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Very cool stuff with HSM now working with modern games. I want to give this a shot with the FF Pixel Remasters to see how it looks as Reshade just can’t do the job.

Does anyone have a good configuration for MvC2 on Dreamcast to make it look great in 240p with even scanlines? I’ve tried some of the DREZ presets but nothing looks as good as using an actual downscaler on real hardware.

Lastly, I’ve been making 4k bezels for arcade games and just wanted to share for those who are interested now that Duimon helped with the parameters.

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Wow, I commented on this once, but at that date it was not possible, this Feature is wonderful, it will allow us to make adjustments to thousands of PC classics, I will test it as soon as possible with old PC Games like Age of Empires II, Transport Giant, Imperialism 2, Warlords Battlecry 3 and many others…

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Have you tried these?

Note the above examples use the 1080p_Optimized versions of those presets. Feel free to try the ones that match your screen resolution.

Also, have you tried lowering the Internal Resolution to 320 x 240? That will mess up your High-Res elements though.

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The creator of WGC @IHQMD has come to our little corner of the internet :smile: and created a thread for discussing WGC!

WGC (Windows Graphics Capture) core; Official release thread

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I still working on it, brightness and gamma is my struggling. But I think I’m going in the good direction…:sweat_smile:

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i finally got some time to look into the WGC core and recorded some gameplay of sonic mania video is uploading

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This is such a nice bezel/overlay I spent an hour figuring out how to get my .HDF workbench from WinUAE working in Retroarch just to experience. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, @TheNamec has made some amazing stuff! The cyberpunk one is so imaginative and SciFi looking.

And Wide Screen!

For anyone interested in these @TheNamec’s packs and thread can be found here:

Commodore & Amiga systems and PVMs:

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Brightness is popping out a last. This is what I was looking for.:sweat_smile:

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genesis flashbacks incoming

without any filter from the game itself and in 640x480 that is now my preferred way to play sonic mania . :star_struck:

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Wow this stuff using WindowCast just keeps getting better, I’ve been dreaming for a way to play AM2R with shaders for a while :star_struck:

Thanks @IHQMD for WindowCast and @p3st for these great shots!

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