New CRT shader from Guest + CRT Guest Advanced updates

[guest.r]

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.

[ROBMARK85]

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:

[guest.r]

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.

[ROBMARK85]

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.

[ROBMARK85]

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.

[Cyber]

@ROBMARK85

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?

CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader Preset Packs

Yep, exactly that. This is only true for games/systems that use 224 horizontal lines, though. For games that use 240 lines, a custom resolution of 1600x1200 can be used. The amount that gets cropped in either case is outside of the safe area for CRTs. 5x vertical scale makes a big difference with the scanline beam dynamics.

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.

CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader Preset Packs

Oh, I find it strange that I’m seeing the Bezel in the screenshots when in my preset I set the Integer Scale to 100% and in my testing the bezel was gone. [MURAMASA - THE DEMON BLADE-220617-030929] [MURAMASA - THE DEMON BLADE-220617-030957] [MURAMASA - THE DEMON BLADE-220617-031026] [MURAMASA - THE DEMON BLADE-220617-031052] [MURAMASA - THE DEMON BLADE-220617-031148]

…and here is the 4K_Optimized version:

CyberLab Death To Pixels Shader Preset Packs

Introducing CyberLab Wii Slot Mask! Note: You have to load full resolution, then open in new tab or window, zoom in or view fullscreen in order for these to look correct because of the mask and scanline settings. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image]

[Cyber]

@ROBMARK85

I’m looking for an authentic look,

@ROBMARK85

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 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.

[ROBMARK85]

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!

[ROBMARK85]

@Guest.r @Cyber ​​I get it and now I fully understand why in magazines everything seems so damn much better than in reality. Too bad that printed paper is not a good way to preserve the art of CRT for posterity.

[Mickevincent]

Hello, making it look like in magasines and boxes is different but might be another way of nostalgia gaming. I remember the swedish magazine Super Play explained in one magazine they used to send image files to somewhere else and then get them printed. Alot of work. This made is look alot different than it did on a real crt. I think they also changed approach many times. Here are some images of how it could look like. And also an image of ny complete collection of Super Play

[Mickevincent]

It didnt always look spectacular. I think many have forgotten how things looked before we got hd in the world.

[guest.r]

New Release Version (2025-01-11-r1):

Notable changes:

• Old: new functionality added with NTSC shaders to better preserve ‘edge’ colors.
• Old: fine-tuning of the new functionality for some specific cases.
• New: more fine tuning, should fix/mitigate some situations.
• Note: is best used with low taps number or/and color bleeding reduction.

Download link:

https://mega.nz/file/M8ZlgQBR#bv9vr1hdExG_qoOliVECuW3vYLXwQFCisic7YP1o0j8

[sonkun]

No you didn’t lol. I was literally waiting to see if you would possibly put out another update after our last conversation, I had a feeling you would go back into the lab for some reason, glad I decided to wait things out. Damn I need to hurry and get home now just so I can test this baby out.

[Superdonkeyjack]

Shoot, Pants just made a Sonkun mod like 10hrs ago. Oh, well.

[ROBMARK85]

Hi @Mickevincent - thanks for sharing these photos, you have a great collection of vintage magazines. I love them and they give me a strong sense of nostalgia, I often look for magazine scans on Internet Archives to take a leap into the 90s, too bad that the images, as they are often retouched, are misleading compared to the real thing, becoming certainly not very useful for preserving our memory of the CRT experience - comparing with my brother-in-law who is another enthusiast, what we saw at the fair with our own eyes actually does not correspond to what they put on game boxes and specialized magazines (as rightly pointed out @Guest.r and @Cyber who I thank) and looking for a similar look can lead you astray - if I remember correctly the CRT shaders newpixie tried to reproduce the magazine style on the screen but at the moment I’m not using it, since I was looking for solutions more in line with reality. It is also true as you specified in the second post that often things were represented worse, but I am Italian and the specialized industry magazines here, from what I could see in person and through the scans, during the screens taken from their reviews trying the game on the field, were committed to giving a clean image of the thing. This is why for a long time I was fixated on the Smooth presets even if I later realized that there I have to consider it as an extra, but not as the correct way to experience retrogaming in my opinion.

[Mickevincent]

Iam very sure they almost never (or maybe never) took pictures of the crt with a camera to put into the magazine. They most likely had some device connected to the console/video out that could “print screen” the image and therefore they did not get any scanlines-effect.

[PU786]

@guest.r

Fields are merged with 3-phase, which sortoff nullifies dynamic fringing w. flickering. You should be good here.

Ah so that’s what that does! I was wondering why there was never a difference when I’d play with that setting.

I notice this does just disable the effects of the fringing instead of essentially making them static instead of flicker.

So as I sit here next to my Sony XBR set, I’ll try to describe what the differences are:

This screenshot shows the Robocop Vs. The Terminator intro screen. The center building at the top of the screen is colored just a bit differently than my CRT and there are some lights on the buildings that don’t pop as much.

When I turn on fringing, it changes the color of that building, it makes the lights on the buildings pop the same way, it matches the Sony apart from two aspects

1. The flickering
2. The comb pattern in the sky

This is kind of difficult to show via the two GDV screenshots because they alternate frames on that chunk of the building where the colors changed to match the Sony:

And that brings me to my point of curiosity. Merge Fields just disables the fringing entirely for 2 Phase (which is perfectly suitable as a happy compromise for me going forward), but would there be a way for like, Merge Fields to freeze the flickering in a combined way? Where it blends the two flicker frames together into a static image like my CRT does?

If not, I understand. Shader-wise I’m still a beginner in all this stuff and don’t fully understand the tech behind it. #old person

[guest.r]

@PU786

Merge Fields just disables the fringing entirely for 2 Phase (which is perfectly suitable as a happy compromise for me going forward), but would there be a way for like, Merge Fields to freeze the flickering in a combined way?

Merge fields calculates two consecutive frame effects and passes on average values of these. It’s similar to what you are supposed to see without merging, but there are no temporal effects / artifacts. Disabling fringing is technically-looking something else, maybe you like merge better, maybe fringing at 0.0, it’s the users choice.

Otherwise i always advise to play a bit with the settings, use what you like best, ask some questions if not sure.

[PU786]

You’re definitely helping me learn more! I appreciate the willingness to answer what are likely tedious questions. Thank you!

[sonkun]

@Superdonkeyjack

Shoot, Pants just made a Sonkun mod like 10hrs ago. Oh, well.

That shouldn’t change anything I hope. I don’t plan to change any settings at all.

@guest.r So the first game I tested was that random Mega Drive racing game I posted up last time and it seems that the issue has been fixed with the checkerboard dithering looking weird and half blended on the purple and light green car:

Both cars look to be fully blended now I think. Gotta do more testing though as I don’t know if those few random red areas on the edges of the purple car along with those few darker blue/purple areas are suppose to be there or not.

Here’s with rainbows activated:

I remember @ProfessorBraun noticing something with vertical line dithering and the waterfall effect, can’t remember exactly what it was but it was mentioned some posts up. Maybe he’ll come around and do some testing as well.