Hey! Happy New Year also!
Regarding the ‘anomaly’, it’s the same old situation, which can be resolved, if some thresholds are raised by a margin, but probably the change would also affect other edges. Dunno here about the solution, some universal setting, which would fit all scenario is probably much harder.
Ah I see. I’m not sure if resolving that will make other unwanted things happen or not, If so I’d rather just deal with the way things currently are. Was just something I came across by chance.
I wanted to thank you for your jawesome work Guest! My friends and I have been benefiting greatly from your hard work and how great these shaders make retro games look.
I noticed your NTSC options have bleed separated into 2 phase and 3 phase settings, this is super helpful! Do you think Fringing could also be separated into 2 phase and 3 phase as well please?? I notice it causes flickering on 2 phase which is bothersome, and I think my Sony XBR960 just filters that out or something because it doesn’t flicker there, like on the Sonic 2 level select for example, whereas it always flashes when fringing is enabled in 2 phase mode in all the NTSC shaders so I tend to prefer it be off.
(separating NTSC Resolution Scaling into 2 and 3 phase would also be super beneficial for me, in terms of having an all console wide universal shader setting)
Alternatively, a dot crawl binary setting might be something.I think because of the comb filter on my XBR960, it prevents dot crawl? Is the flickering I see in 2 Phase also considered dot crawl?
Sorry for any ignorance I may have. 
Hi all - after being at a retrogaming fair I tried to dust off the NTSC version of Guest Advance to find a more authentic look - could someone kindly share the settings for the NTSC part of the shader to get a good S-Video to use for 16 and 32 bit? I’m playing with the Chrome blending and resolution values but I’m not getting the results I’m hoping for, it all seems wrong, maybe someone of you has already found some good values - thanks a lot
Lots of people have already found good values. All you need to do is look through this thread and the Please Show Off What Crt Shaders Can do thread.
I’m so glad that I found this forum since June 2022. These CRT shaders are incredible, and it even looks better than the CRT TV that I had before 2009.
Thank you so much for this post that is very helpful to me - tonight I will take stock of the situation to find the most favorable situation for me - very kind as always @Cyber - and I take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy start to the year.
Don’t forget if it’s just the NTSC filtering and artifacts you’re interested in you can always try out Blargg Video Filter Presets in Settings–>Video–>Filters. You can get additional video filter presets in my CyberLab Custom Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets pack.
Thanks and Happy New Year to everyone as well!
Hey! It’s appreciated! I’m always fond if someone finds a good use for these shaders.
By the default fields merging, fringing shouldn’t be an issue with the 3-phase mode. Fields are merged with 3-phase, which sortoff nullifies dynamic fringing w. flickering. You should be good here. Also to be noted is that the NTSC Sharpen (Adaptive) also mitigates fringing greatly. It’s a good setting which i often recommend to be used. You can also decide to always merge fields, which can be a great setting, rainbowing also works with 2-phase and merged fields.
This feature would require a much more complex codepath. Since these shaders are also a part of a regular slang shaders ntsc presets, i try to avoid more slowdowns, especially in the first pass (which is 4xscaled and much more performance sensitive).
It was considered as an annoying “feature” by some, lol, but it isn’t implemented in the ntsc shaders as dot crawl by name. Chroma and luma cross-talk (cause for dot crawl) is implemented though as artifacting and fringing. Dunno if this reproduces the exact dot crawl effect of a specific crt tv at given input resolution, but it’s a sortoff general cross-talk implementation.
I love Blargg and your modified version makes it even more beautiful to look at and use, but unfortunately it is not always supported by Cores other than those for 8 and 16 Bit which also have this option internally (but yours are much better). I also read somewhere that Blargg had created specific filters for the various systems, but I don’t know why RetroArch only has those for SNES, from which your optimized, revised and corrected versions then come.
S-Video is all about setting artifacting and fringing down to 0.0. If you want stronger filtering with increasing internal resolution of the games, then you can increase the Internal Resolution parameter also. NTSC settings shouldn’t be a major problem. Only these 3 params for start, maybe you can also lower the number of taps, which will also reduce color bleeding.
Interlacing mode is best set to 4.0 or 5.0 for better vertical smoothness.
The challenge, as usual, is setting the mask and mask mitigation settings right for your taste, maybe also contrast and brightness.
I wouldn’t advise to use BLARGG’s + NTSC shaders at the same time though, as the image would get excess filtering, which is not desirable.
First of all thanks for your help, at the moment I’m looking for an authentic look, also thanks to the memory refreshed through my presence at the fair I was talking about, so they don’t increase the Core resolution, if I understood correctly, I can leave the internal resolution value on 1. At this point to have a sharper image I have to play with the values of blending colors and NTSC sharper if I understood correctly. I can also leave the classic Aperture Grill mask that on my 1080 is the best, but I would like to get closer to a look like this (it’s a cut of a photo of the original box of Street Fighter II PAL for Super Nintendo - as a child I craved it even if I got a PC instead of the console - so I apologize for the low quality - unfortunately the photos of the video screens with my modest cell phone came out very badly):
other examples:
These magazine scan? images are always a bit tricky, usually at this point in history they were digitaly edited by the redaction and sent to printing. Printing also left some printing artifacts/patterns. And possible scanning also…Sometimes publishers sent printed materials to magazines, which were then used etc.
As far as we all know YT compression of alternate sources also brings good results under magnifying effects.
Best possible source for shader comparison is taking a photo of the screen under proper conditions, @MajorPainTheCactus gave some good advices here.
Otherwise it’s a very good advice at this time to select a desired cable connection, desired TVL, desired mask type (aperture)…and some fine tunning afterwards.
At this point I think I have to go the Blargg route (especially those calibrated and modified by @Cyber) together with your Guest Advance - also because doing some tests personally gives me the result closest to what I’m looking for - at this point as a last request I would like to know if there is somewhere a list of Cores for the various systems compatible with Blargg - if I don’t find anything maybe I’ll create a thread to try to collect as much information as possible - in the meantime thank you very much for your work @Guest and @Cyber that you share with us users and for always following all our requests. Thank you very much.
PS at the next fair my wife’s camera was brought to me (even if she is the expert). I took a dive into the crazy past and also completely revised my expectations in the world of retrogaming looking for aspects closer to reality (for a period I was mistakenly fixated on ScaleFX, but I think it should be considered an extra rather than the main road to the world of retrogaming). In the future I will aim for a 4K panel with maybe 240 hz refresh (did someone say crt-beam?) for a more authentic look - at the moment I remain anchored to the grill aperture which is the only Standard that can be well reproduced that the resolutions I have now.
Are you sure about this? Guest’s Mask 6 at Size 1, Width - Auto or 1, Height - to taste (probably 1 or 2) produces a mean looking Slot Mask to my knowledge.
You just have to make sure you get your vertical scaling right so at 1080p you’d want to use maybe 5X integer scale for 1,120 vertical pixels for 224p and 1,200 for 240p content with some being cropped off as overscan.
Nowadays we should just be able to set the aspect ratio on Core Provided or 4:3 and set Integer Scale to On. I like to enable it for both X and Y axis although some might prefer just the Y axis and Integer Scale Overscale to Smart.
Have you actually tried these settings?
Also, I’m pretty sure you can do a decent Lottes or Guest Shadow Mask as well at 1080p or am I mistaken?
I had to go back and check for myself. This is an example of a Slot Mask Preset at 1080p resolution.
It’s my CyberLab Slot Mask Wii from the 1080p_Optimized folder of my Mega Bezel Preset Pack.
…and here is the 4K_Optimized version:
I agree with @guest.r on this one. Magazine or print media photos are not an authentic representation of how those games looked on a CRT TV of the era.
For that you need to see the games on a real CRT using an unmodified console and typical video i/o at the time.
Alternatively good quality photos of CRT TV setups with unmodified consoles in action.
Even if you got a hold of an old video game mag, those clear pictures didn’t have things like scanlines or the Mask because they would have deliberately defocused the camera to hide them.
Another thing that magazines could have had would be halftone patterns. So to get a refresher of what an authentic image would have looked like you need an authentic source.
Thank you so much!!! I had missed this, since when I used your work I was mainly dedicating myself to Arcade games and therefore I had not tried everything. Tomorrow I will do some more tests and go and see. I had missed these things, thank you so much!
