LK Looks good, What Mask are you using?
I’m also wondering in general if the glow should be over or under the mask, I’ve noticed in some screen shots it seems to be showing up with patterns from the screen
You can see some other close shots from the NEC XM29 Plus where I found this one here:
I believe that’s the internal reflection from the glass reflecting back onto the phosphor grid. My XM29+ has righteous internal reflections, and it looks like that one does, too. (I assume it’s because the glass is very thick)
Ah, that would make sense with how wide the glow is, and how it doesn’t have RGB components in it, and that it’s mostly whitish
That does bring up the question of whether that’s something we actually want. That is, we know there’s a difference between diffusion/halation (above the mask) and bloom (bright pixels on the mask exceeding our eyes’ dynamic range), so I guess it’s worth considering how much of the former bounces back onto the phosphor grid. (could be shown as raised black level just where there’s diffusion/halation 
)
OTOH, sometimes details like that can look weird in actual execution. An uncanny valley sort of thing, i guess.
I prefer mask being over bloom personally.
Glow should be the very last thing that is applied and it shouldn’t alter the mask colors if you want it to work like an actual CRT.
Reflected light could wash out the mask/raise the black level some, but that’s not exactly a desirable feature (IMO).
Well the way glow works now it’ll most likely alter mask colors where glow is being applied.
Just because it’s not a desirable feature for you, doesn’t mean it isn’t wanted. I don’t see the issue with it being included as long as you can disable it.
I was speaking more about how this was perceived during the actual CRT era; no one wanted this and manufacturers tried several things to eliminate it as much as possible because it degraded the objective quality. Now nostalgia is a factor and some people might want to recreate these once-undesirable features.
Washing out the mask is going to result in a washed out image and/or poor phosphor definition so the objective quality and other aspects of the crt emulation will suffer, but just about everything you do with crt shaders involves some kind of trade-off.
I’m still not sure what you’re talking about washing the mask out.
If glow raises the brightness of the mask/phosphors that’s washing them out; the phosphors become less visible and the colors lose saturation
That’s a glow issue, unrelated to mask over bloom.
This gets confusing because the terms are often used interchangeably but they’re different things.
HSM posted a very defocused shot. In reality the white text is composed of 100% R, G and B phosphors and if you zoom in enough / focus the camera, that’s what you’d see. Is that what you mean by “mask over bloom?”
Sorry to jump in, i think this might be a fun-fact with shader glow.
Linear space has to be considered with shader implementation, and the math is much different there. Glow is an additive functionality with very interesting properties. Assuming both gammas of 2.4.
If background is black, then the default 0.04*Glow has a max appearance of 0.26 when transformed back to reference space.
But if a color is like 0.5 (max, average, whatever), it’s un-glowing output transforms to 0.75.
Color of 0.5 + 0.04 of white glow transforms into 0.77, which makes 2.7% brightness increase in reference space.
My implementation mitigates the influence over brighter colors, so with “0.5” colors it influences less than 2% in reference space and decreasing with brightness.
That’s why you need much more glow for specific effects, and a notch for ‘regular glow’ functionality.
Mask 1 for console (5 is good too) and Mask 3 for Arcade. And you?
Good images for reference.
So my visual memory didn’t fool me.
In fact, on TVs where I played video games the black background was not so black and you could see the scanlines.
If it’s the scanlines themselves that are visible over black, that can only be the result of the black level being set too high. Of course it’s personal preference etc etc but with the black level being higher you’re necessarily reducing the dynamic range / contrast ratio…
It’s contrast ratio / dynamic range where LCDs fail the hardest at emulating a CRT, IMO. My eyes keep craving more and more contrast and saturation until I eventually snap and turn off all the mask effects, which also doesn’t look right because it’s too blurry.
However, I recently discovered that mask 8 and the gdv slotmask by themselves are very good at preserving contrast and saturation compared to the rest. With the other masks you kind of just have to embrace the clipping if you don’t want an overly dim, dull image.
I think the primary issue in this discussion is we are wanting different things, your leaning hard towards 1:1 perfect emulation and at least me, is leaning for quality looking and the ability to add the “shitty” defects (deconvergence, scanlines over black, static/grain, mask over bloom halos).
Well yeah we have different preferences, but I’m not sure why this is an issue…?
For me at least, many of the effects lead to the uncanny valley sort of thing that hunterk mentioned. I have enough experience with how these things look on an actual CRT that I can pretty much immediately tell when there isn’t enough contrast, saturation, etc, and I do prioritize that above everything else because it’s essential to the whole CRT phosphor glow thing; IMO that’s what makes an image on a CRT look amazing. I’m also considering how these effects look when actually playing a game vs. a screenshot.
I guess I don’t really have nostalgia for low quality TVs, I have nostalgia for CRT phosphor glow and contrast ratio. Even a crappy Walmart CRT TV had a better contrast ratio than most modern displays.
CRTs have contrast ratios of at least 150,000:1. The worst CRTs have thirty times better contrast than the best VA LCDs and 150 times better contrast than the worst TN LCDs. TN LCDs have up to about 1000:1, depending on the monitor. IPS LCDs have up to about 2000:1, depending on the monitor. VA LCDs have about up to 5,000:1, depending on the monitor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GloriousCRTMasterRace/wiki/guide#wiki_better_contrast_ratio
I just started playing with the filtering options and I can already see the advantages vs. subtractive sharpening.
What settings do you recommend for sharp high-contrast edges but smooth elsewhere (the bicubic look)?
first attempt:
From my experience such a look starts at horizontal sharpness below 4.0 and is usable to about 2.4. Good spot is 2.8 -3.2. Substractive sharpness 1.0 is special, other is convenience or preference.
