Need help with best RetroArch settings

RetroArch General
#1

Greetings fellas,

I have a brother who’s quite interested in gaming with RetroArch. He is, however, quite the stickler when it comes down to quality, so much so that he wishes to game on it under the conditions that best provide his desired experience.

I’d like to help him in achieving this goal, but seeing as I’m quite inexperienced to some of RetroArch’s functions, I’d like to request the community’s help with the following:

  1. How to run RetroArch on a PC at 1080p.
  2. A shader/filter configuration that best provides a visual experience close to that of a FrameMeister’s. Failing that, at least one that is crystal clear, with no scrolling flicker or pixel distortion if possible.

For now, I think that’s all he’d like ensure. If something else comes up, I’ll be sure to post here. For now however, I’d like to thank in advance to whoever manages to help out with this.

Cheers!

#2

For #1, just run it on a 1080p screen and it will scale to fit. There’s a complication, though: running at non-integer scale factors causes problems with scanlines; specifically, they look uneven. There are some shaders where this is less noticeable, namely cgwg’s CRT-Geom and EasyMode’s CRT-EasyMode, but these also do more to the picture than your brother may be wanting. I own a Framemeister and it’s pretty simple in what it does to the signal compared with those shaders.

I think the best option, personally, is to run at integer scaling (you can enable it in the video options) and use either the scanline.cg shader or ntsc/ntsc-gauss-pass.cg shaders from the common shaders repo. This will leave some small black letterboxing around the top/bottom of the image, but it will ensure that your scanlines are crisp.

#3

Regarding the uneven scanlines when [u]NOT [/u ]using integer scaling hunterk, could this be something fixed in an update to RetroArch, or is there now way around it if your not using integer scaling?

#4

There’s nothing RetroArch can do about it, and it’s been an issue with emulators for a very long time. It’s up to the shaders themselves to correct for it. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any one-size-fits-all solution that could be applied to any/all shaders.

#5

Hey guys, thanls for all the help.

I’ve been trying to apply some of the shaders that were mentioned here, but RetroArch gives me an error and says that it reverts back to stock shaders or something like that. I’m using v1.0.0.2 x64.

#6

What’s the error? Just to be clear, you use ‘load shader preset’ to select a cgp (a special kind of shader that uses many individual Cg shaders together) but to load a single Cg shader, you need to set the shader pass to 1 (from zero), then go down to ‘shader #0’ and navigate to the Cg shader you wish to use.

#7

Pixel I had the same issue until I recompiled retroarch after ./configure --enable-cg…

#8

Here’s a screenshot I took regarding the problem:

This happens whenever I attempt to use any of the single pass shaders from the repository. Using the ones that came bundled with my copy of RetroArch doesn’t cause any errors and work as they should.

As for shader presets, the included ones seem to work just fine, though I haven’t gotten the opportunity to try any presets from the repository.

#9

Ah, I bet I know what’s happening: when you download from the repo, make sure you’re getting the ‘raw’ code and not just right-clicking on the link and saving, as it will be full of HTML markup shit.

Click on the shader you want, let it load up the code, then click the ‘raw’ button in the upper-right. When the page reloads (just a white page with text; no github formatting/wrapper stuff), right-click anywhere and you can ‘save as’ and it will work.

#10

Thanks hunterk, I just tried doing as you said and the shaders worked wonderfully this time.

Speaking of which, I was looking for a combination of shaders that would allow be to recreate the artifacts of an NTSC shader (Sonic’s mosaic waterfall) will keeping all the benefits of the pixellate shader (pixel-sharp image quality). Is such a combination possible, and if so, what combo would be recommended?

#11

You can try Sp00kyFox’s mdapt, which blends dithering, or you can try aliaspider’s GTU, which I forgot to mention above but looks very much like a framemeister with scanlines turned on. It does a better job of blending for transparency than any other shaders, but it might not be sharp enough for your liking.

You can also use the ntsc-rgb core option from genplusgx, which should leave your pixels pretty sharp but still do some blending.