New CRT shader from Guest + CRT Guest Advanced updates

rafan · 2 April 2022 08:08

@Rincewind that’s a few nice looking screenshots with the subtle scanlines, well done.

Many of the retroarch cores have really come up to par with the standalone emulators in the past few years.

Did you try the P-UAE libretro core for Amiga? It’s quite neat if you get to grips with the many options this core provides in its options menu and sonninos has really been making this a worthy contender.

Also with regards to DOSBOX, I would really suggest you try the DOSBOX-Pure libretro core. It’s maintained by someone who really knows what he’s doing and has many features that go way ahead of the standalone version (think proper v-sync support!)

For these cores you could simply apply the things RealNC already mentioned, e.g. set scaling to 3.5 times in RA video options and, last but not least, apply guest.r latest shader on it.

I see where you’re coming from with the subtle scanlines approach, maybe it’s a thing that has to do with the difference between PAL and NTSC mode on monitors, the scanlines used to be much more subtle for PAL. I’m sure these could be replicated in RA and maybe a bit more. And as you noticed guest.r is quite frequently here and always willing to listen and improve things.

Syh · 2 April 2022 12:44

I think the scanline thing has more to do with Consumer set vs computer monitor than NTSC vs PAL. ( I do agree that NTSC vs PAL scanlines are probably different)

As usually I can notice scanlines on most consumer sets, but it’s nigh impossible to see my scanlines on my actual CRT monitors.

RealNC · 2 April 2022 13:06

Amiga monitors are different. They support 15khz input, where progressive scan leaves every other scanline empty. VGA monitors only support 31khz input or higher. Low resolutions are line-doubled, and thus all scanlines appear filled.

This is a CRT monitor without line-doubling (the 31khz requirement is reached though horizontal res increase):

This is basically how an Amiga monitor works with low-res content.

This is the same monitor but with line-doubling, which is how VGA monitors are driven:

So as you can see, there can’t ever be black scanlines in 320x200 or 320x240 DOS games on a CRT monitor. But there will be with Amiga games on a 15khz monitor.

Rincewind · 2 April 2022 13:12

Cheers, I’ve gone full OCD with this in the last couple of days!

Haven’t tried any cores, just launched RetroArch, then uninstalled after 5 minutes because it gave me MAME flashbacks (very shallow, I know…) I think I’ll mess around a bit with these DOSBox cores just to give these new shaders a go. I’m perfectly happy with Guest’s old WinUAE shaders, and I just love WinUAE, so there’s very little incentive for me to switch to any other Amiga emulator. Beamracing vsync works like a dream, and I have a highly customised setup (like every WinUAE user, I’m sure). Ideally, I’d like to apply TV shaders to my ZX Spectrum emulator and a few others like GSPlus, WinAPE, etc. that support only very rudimentary scanline “emulation” (e.g. darken every second line… ugh), so if anything, I’m more interested in how those fare on RetroArch.

Btw, can this thing be used from the command line using scripts if I don’t care about the media player like UI?

Good observation, I used to use PAL modes on my Amiga 99% of the time, then moved on to a VGA PC. I had a later revision Amiga 500 that could be soft-switched into NTSC and my monitor supported it too. Tried it a few times with games that only used the upper 200 rows of the screen, but didn’t like the stretching effect – the scanlines became quite visible, indeed! I didn’t realise it back then that I was playing all those US made titles with the wrong aspect ratio, oh well…

Anyhow, here are two screens from the legendary Jim Sachs, now with NTSC-stretch. The scanlines are more visible, although still quite tame compared to what I can regularly see being posted here.

hunterk · 2 April 2022 13:27

762327

For real, tho: use whatever floats your boat. WinUAE’s beamracing is indeed some hot shit.

Ultimately, at low output multipliers, even fancy shaders kinda just turn into subtle integer-scale scanlines (in best-case scenarios; sometimes they look worse than that), but you’ll be able to have more fun with low-res 240p/200p stuff as you mentioned.

Syh · 2 April 2022 14:11

Ooops, didn’t realize we were talking about Amiga monitors specifically, and did not know that info, so thanks for letting me know.

I do think the rest of my comment was reasonable tho, as we are discussing 15khz vs 31khz signals. (basically)

rafan · 2 April 2022 20:50

Yes sure you can!

Just type “Retroarch -help” in the command prompt and it’ll show all the options.

So for example loading a core with a specific config file and game you would start the following when in the the retroarch folder (example snes game):

Retroarch.exe -L "cores\mesen-s_libretro.dll" -c "config\mesen-s_libretro.cfg" "path\to\game.rom"

Mind you there is a learning curve with RA, one thing to remember is to enable save config on exit when in Retroarch and it’ll update the config with your setting changes such that it gets loaded again with the changed options next time.

I’m using Launchbox myself and can really recommend it as it makes managing your games library and various emulators much easier. Once properly setup you can even right click on games and choose by which emulator the game should be started. It also automates the proces of automatically downloading game Box images from the Launchbox database when “importing” games etc.

For getting to grips with the core options for the more “complicated” systems it’s best to visit the specific libretro git repository which many of them have extensive README.md if you scroll down. Like te one I linked for Dosbox-pure. If you would like to try the PUAE core a good starting point is the https://github.com/libretro/libretro-uae page, which is very extensive in its explanation.

Cyber · 2 April 2022 22:33

What Media Player like UI? You know you can change the Menu driver right?

Try the Ozone Menu driver.

Rincewind · 2 April 2022 23:54

Cheers, that’s was informative! I just have my own system for organising emulators & games on the filesystem per platform, not too keen to change that or reimport half my games into RA. Looks like there’s hope though.

Whatever the current default is looks like the UI of my Raspberry PI mediaplayer (LibreELEC) Too consolised, too much animation. Anyway, probably a non-issue if I’m gonna use it via the command line anyway, eventually. The basic RGUI looks fine if I’ll need the UI, simple, fast, effective.

For the record, my GUI-ideals are along these lines

RealNC · 3 April 2022 04:23

Just -L mesen-s works fine. You don’t need the full filename of the DLL or its path. (This feature got added a couple months ago.)

rafan · 4 April 2022 11:41

That’s a super neat tool, thanks for sharing (and to the author of shaderglass for creating it).

It could be worthwhile to update guest advanced in the RA repository, such that if shaderglass resyncs it will include guest’s updates from the last 8 months (too many to name )

guest.r · 5 April 2022 16:37

New Release Version (2022-04-05-r1):

Notable changes:

another mask added: RRGGBBX for 4k+ setups
mask strength parameter has a smaller step now
increased overscan parameter range
some very small changes
existing recent presets shouldn’t be affected by the introduced changes

Download link:

https://mega.nz/file/QtgylYwB#BwdlfAch7hzE0b7nYurNTMZdhezk_CUO3bcU8bz-yWY

Nesguy · 6 April 2022 17:18

Setting aside any color/brightness issues, can someone please explain to me why this looks so clean? As I understand it, GDV-NTSC is basically just adding NTSC Adaptive to GDV, right?

Why am I having such a hard time getting GDV-NTSC to look similar, with clean edges and natural beam width variation? The white text on the blue background in SMB is killing me.

Megatron NTSC preset with a couple tweaks for 1080p.

guest.r · 6 April 2022 19:21

You can tweak some settings a bit for a sharper look:

Setting both main gamma values to 1.0 and using blend mode 2.0 also does a nice job:

ynnad4 · 6 April 2022 19:58

Greetings. I have been testing up your whole CRT guest advanced progress within the couple of presets you have already available.

I’d like to know it could ever be possible to add up within any of the current presets or a new one that could contain this particular effect known as Rainbow banding that was present on Sega Genesis console games. There’s a thread already talking about this:

For example in that particular reply, there’s a Sega Genesis demostration with RF connection which exposes the colorful red lines coming along with green and blue. The whole thread overall exposes different variants I did over time with public modded versions from mame_hlsl alone or with some few other presets like ntsc adaptive.

Would be great if that particular effect can be applied to other shader/presets that come along with composite-blurry looking just like some of you already have the capability of dithering presence. I unfortunately couldn’t find any other shader/preset that could apply accurately this effect just like it is for the real console.

Not to mention the fact such mame_hlsl preset along with others like tvout-tweak can allow to tweak intensity of the rainbow effect but also how specifically separate are each colorful line from each other, which helps out greatly in accuracy compared to the already existent NTSC shader/presets that to an extent deliver these Rainbow artifacts but in the same time far from being that accurate just like mame_hlsl.

I hope you can reply and thank you a lot for such a great job within your updated shaders.

Nesguy · 6 April 2022 20:06

Color issues aside that looks very good. Settings, please!

hunterk · 6 April 2022 20:28

you should be able to replace the ntsc-adaptive passes in guest’s presets with the ntsc passes from mame_hlsl with your settings in most cases.

Syh · 6 April 2022 21:55

Honestly quiet a few of MAMEs passes can be used with other presets. (At least like 3-4 off the top of my head.)

ynnad4 · 6 April 2022 22:18

any ideas ? i may appreciate any preset you could know in how to mix those two passes with:

shader0 = "../crt/shaders/mame_hlsl/shaders/mame_ntsc_encode.slang"
filter_linear0 = "true"
wrap_mode0 = "clamp_to_border"
mipmap_input0 = "false"
alias0 = "NTSCPass"
float_framebuffer0 = "false"
srgb_framebuffer0 = "false"
scale_type_x0 = "source"
scale_x0 = "1.000000"
scale_type_y0 = "source"
scale_y0 = "1.000000"

shader1 = "../crt/shaders/mame_hlsl/shaders/mame_ntsc_decode.slang"
filter_linear1 = "true"
wrap_mode1 = "clamp_to_border"
mipmap_input1 = "false"
alias1 = "ColorPass"
float_framebuffer1 = "false"
srgb_framebuffer1 = "false"
scale_type_x1 = "source"
scale_x1 = "1.000000"
scale_type_y1 = "source"
scale_y1 = "1.000000"

ntscsignal = "1.000000"
shadowalpha = "0.100000"
avalue = "0.000000"
bvalue = "0.000000"
pvalue = "1.100000"
scantime = "47.700073"
notch_width = "3.450001"
ifreqresponse = "1.750000"
qfreqresponse = "1.450000"

Nesguy · 7 April 2022 14:25

Here’s gamma 1.0/1.0, blend mode 2 with a few tweaks (mask strength 100%, etc). Looks fantastic! The edges and beam variation look very natural.

What settings did you use to produce the first screenshot you posted?