Mega Bezel Reflection Shader! - Feedback and Updates

[Duimon]

@Zayd47

I’m sorry,Just getting excited for these shaders til i forgot to mention

Please, please, please don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.

This community… specifically this thread by @HyperspaceMadness and my own, are safe places.

While it might be easier if everyone who had an issue or question was an IT specialist with a mature knowledge of Retroarch and an intimate knowledge of computers… there is no minimum threshold to ask for help.

If I could make private threads public you could see the many hours I have spent with new users walking them through just setting up shaders and/or overlays. Some of these valuable experiences have made their way into guides in my repo and benefit the entire community.

The last thing we want is users being afraid to ask a question or leaving feeling guilty or belittled.

Please. If you have any question, about anything, no matter how seemingly trivial, ask it here or in my thread.

Feel free to PM me if that is what it takes to get you where you need to be.

[Cyber]

@Zayd47

No but some of my apps requesting graphic update is required and that mean more headache are coming my way.

One possible solution/workaround to this might be dual booting a second installation of Windows with drivers that work better/properly with RetroArch.

Your “work” installation/partition can have the more up to date stuff.

[Zayd47]

I am no advance/expert user for this mechanicals of windows and i do not know how to dual boot,My MSI GT80 have gpu switch and i have tried that either but the pc went black screen for an hour.I try to ask in nvidia community and many said that it was hardware related issue.Im sorry,This might be out of topic,Im sorry to bring this issue here

[Zayd47]

Thank You @Duimon,Im a fan of your shaders too.Looks great and i really likes it so damn much! btw,Im using this with fbneo.

[Duimon]

Your enthusiasm warms my heart.

My goal has always been to enhance the user experience, bring back memories, and improve immersion.

BTW… I do have an FB-Neo preset.

Although I don’t do many arcade presets, the cabinet one’s are fairly precious to me.

Especially the tilted versions.

The tilt can affect performance though.

[Zayd47]

The ‘Tilt’ caught my attention,Will try that.Thank You

[ROBMARK85]

Hi @hyperspacemadness, thanks to your work and that of @duimon I’m finally enjoying your work exactly as I wanted. Thanks to you and to all those who collaborated. I have a question/request to ask: using @duimon’s presets I saw the possibility of using the “drez” presets, which if I understand correctly perform a downsampling of the image exactly as the internal function of the Beetle PSX HW does when it is used at resolutions higher than the internal one, but there is a “smooth-ADV” version only with “gdv-ntsc”. Would it be possible in the future to include a variant that only includes the classic GDV? Thank you very much for everything.

[Duimon]

I’m fairly sure that will be an easy request to fulfill.

In the mean time you could use the 480p and then use the Scanline Opposite Direction Multiplier parameter to finish the job.

I tend to take this route because I prefer the end result compared to the DREZ 240p presets.

[ROBMARK85]

Thank you so much, your work is fantastic. However, I’m using the “drez-smooth-adv-gdv-ntsc” at 480 with your “playstation-drez” with excellent results (I use a 2x “internal resolution”, and I would also like to try the 3x soon) but I didn’t particularly love the NTSC effect in this scenario. I will try what you kindly indicated, hoping that in the future the variant with the classic “GDV” will still be included

[ROBMARK85]

PS I apologize for the question that might seem silly, but I was wondering if I brought the internal resolution to X3 on the PlayStation, as well as on the Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast, whether this value generated with the increase could correspond to 720p, or it is better to think about the simple X2 increase in resolution. Thanks for your help.

[Kefka2b]

thanks for the tip! this will be helpful.

[krelian99]

Hello everyone, sorry for any mistakes while writing, it is my first time in the forum.

I have a technical question. I was using the shader MBZ_0_SMOOTH-ADV-GLASS.slangp with a SEGA CD overlay by Orionsangel while playing Santcher in SEGA CD on the Genesis Plus GX core, I was doing a test and then I selected another shader from the Base_CRT_Presets and then the shader stop working and now everytime I try to use any shader with the reflection effect RetroArch just wont load it and tells me that “Failed to apply shader preset”

I am following the instructions provided and even reload RetroArch and the shaders and start from scratch and I can not get RetroArch to use any advance shader or any shader with reflections. The most it allows me to use is the MBZ_2_ADV-NO-REFLECT, but anything else above it or with glass or reflections it just do no work. Sadly there is no pic to upload since there is nothing remarkable apparently happening. Does anyone has any suggestions? Thanks in advance and apologise for my English as is not my mother tongue. Cheers

[CrackSmokingWarlock]

I’m using the TV-Console-Night/Nintendo_SuperNintendo-[SpecialPurple]-[FLAT].slangp shader and I’m wondering if there is any way I can reduce the darkening of the overall image visible in the attached picture. I haven’t modified it beyond changing the aspect ratio and making the outside bezel graphics darker and I already did ye olde troubleshooting method of skimming through and messing with every “brightness” setting but nothing seems to change this. You can clearly see even between the scanlines that the grass is darker, for example.

[Duimon]

I think the darkening is just the scanlines. You can try going to the end of the parameter list. (Just move up at the beginning to get to the end.)

There you can try adjusting the mask values, mask type, scanline type, or add bloom/halation etc.

[HyperspaceMadness]

Have you tried the Post CRT brightness parameter? It’s right near the beginning of the parameter list.

It should be able to increase brightness up to and past the values clipping at 100%

[exodus123456]

Any idea why this happens and how can I fix it?

This happens randomly when trying presets, it happens with the default preset too and it gets tied to a core (other cores are not affected).

[HyperspaceMadness]

Hey @exodus123456, Great to see you here!

This is usually related to the resolution the core is outputting at the time, in this experience I think the core is outputing 420 px tall.

The reason for the interference pattern is the scanlines are already fighting a bit with the amount of resolution available and then the reflection blurring this.

I think in the V2 version which is still in development this is fixed, because I think I removed the scanlines outside the screen for the blurred reflection

[ROBMARK85]

Hi everyone. Please, I needed some information from some of you: reading in the dedicated section on GitHub how Mega Bezels work, how they work and the differences between the various versions, I read that the “smooth_adv” preset applies a 3x increase in resolution (if not I misunderstood). Does this increase therefore concern both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics of games run with this preset? If the answer is yes, then there is no need to possibly upscale the internal resolution from the core emulator to improve the three-dimensional as much as the two-dimensional. Thanks for anyone who can help me understand this mechanism.

[Duimon]

@ROBMARK85

need to possibly upscale the internal resolution

Post upscaling the output won’t give the same results as pre-upscaling in the core. The intention behind the shader upscaling is for a different purpose. (Perhaps @HyperspaceMadness can elaborate.)

Be careful though… internal upscaling will cause retroarch to crash when using the smooth presets.

If you can give more details on what you are looking for, perhaps we can point you in the right direction.

[ROBMARK85]

First of all, thanks so much for your help. I noticed (in my opinion) a strong difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics with the “smooth_adv” preset, a difference mainly linked to the low resolution of the three-dimensional content, mentioning first of all platforms such as Playstation or Saturn. So in light of your answer, I believe that the way to standardize the image is to use the internal resolution increase, using 2X or 3X, through the Core options, and absolutely using “Drez_smooth_Adv_480” as presets , as these apply supersampling to the upscaled image before starting the shader chain. Hence my request that I made a few days ago to have a Drez smooth preset on the roster in the future that uses the classic GDV, and I believe that it is the right way to go to have the balance I am looking for. I love how smooth benefits two-dimensional, as it does three-dimensional, but the bottleneck is resolutions. I hope I don’t make a mistake.