It looks like it might be just a 2D game. In which case you wouldn’t need to mess around with internal resolution at all (if you are a beginner, I would not). “Upscaling” is really relevant for games with 3D elements, as those can be rendered at higher resolutions.
You can try to set X Resolution to 3840 or lower. Lower will make the image blurrier. Y can be set in 216 steps. This affects how scanlines are set.
Funny this has come up - I’ve also been experimenting with CRT shaders in modern pixel art games.
I’ve found that Guest HD has a large enough number of parameters to get the scan lines and mask I like; however on my mini PC it is a bit of a struggle to maintain FPS with Guest on.
So, using Megatron is usually a good compromise if I can convert to HDR, however I can’t get the same mask size and shape as I do with Guest. Frustrating!
So my question is, how does the math work with internal resolution, mask size and mask zoom? I think I can approximate the guest HD mask in Megatron by using Reshade’s global resolution, but so far I’ve not managed to find the right resolution.
I realise this is probably a tough question to answer…I’ll follow up with some example parameters in a bit.
The other question I have is how does the guest shader deal with HDR? Prepending with an HDR plugin and using the AutoHDR add-in in Reshade doesn’t seem to produce the right colours.
Of course the ideal scenario is for @DevilSingh to port Guest Lite to Reshade 
Thanks as ever for all your efforts!
After a bit of testing, I think the mask size I’m after is basically the height of the resolution divided by 3.
So for 1080p, Reshade’s height should be 360; for 2160p it should be 720. This works for Megatron and I might see if using those lower resolutions for Guest improves the performance.
I hope this makes sense to someone…
Edit: fixed my numbers…
Vaguely. Changing height Reshade height is affecting the scanline gaps.
Your math on the other hand does not make any sense. Just check your numbers.
Done. Brain fart.
I was running Jack Move in 4k and it looked best with a res of 540 in height…
Just read through the Reshade thread and the mind boggles at getting these numbers right!
Just to follow on from my previous post, Blasphemous is on Steam for £2 at the moment, and I thought I’d give it a pop with Guest HD in Reshade. It’s basically perfect for this application; as the whole game has essentially been developed entirely in pixel art (including the text) and so it scales perfectly with the shader.
Another benefit is due to pixel art scaling, the game looks the same in 1080p as it does in 4k; so you can run it at lower resolutions for improved performance. This goes for Guest HD in Reshade too - the game’s native res is 640x360; so setting Reshade’s global preprocessing resolutions to that, and then leaving internal resolution at 0, Mask size at 1 and mask zoom at 0 results in perfect masks and scanlines.
Enabling VGA double scan provides a lovely high TTL result as well; just like playing on a decent VGA monitor (as the setting is intended for, I assume!)
Here’s a close up of mask 7 on my LG BX OLED. I really like seeing the masks rather than just the straight scanlines
One last general question for @guest.r - apologies if this has been asked before, but what is the difference between each version of the shader? NTSC is self explanatory; but I’m unclear the difference between HD and Advanced; for example.
It’d also be great to one day have a wiki or explainer of each setting for those of us just starting out on our fiddling-with-shaders-and-not-actually-playing-the-games journey 
Thanks again!
Hey there!
I’m going straight to the differences. The HD version also includes a vertical filter, which gets enabled either with interlacing or with high resolution scanlines parameter ON. HD filter can also have much greater “strength and reach”, which can come handy with some situations.
The main benefit of regular advanced version is TATE mode (vertical flow of scanlines), otherwise it’s a version with a complete set of features. It also includes raster bloom and smart horizontal filtering, but i guess this can be more or sometimes less important…
That’s great, thanks! I know what TATE mode is but not sure on the other stuff. HD works well with modern games though, that’s for sure.
As far as stress on the system is concerned, which is most and least intensive? It’s become a hobby of mine to get the most out of the least; and interest in this is become more universal with the advent of the Steam Deck
HD version can be least intensive, if you stretch the filter range like with Internal Resolution, then things become slower. NTSC version can be most intensive and demanding, especially if you crank up x-resolution and y-resolution.
With Retroarch there are also fast and fastest verisons where fastest is also suitable for “low-power” mobiles. Fast version though, has a much better feature set.
If you want a mask that looks more like a real CRT’s Mask on your OLED TV, try the RRGGBBX (or XRRGGBB) Mask, Size 1 and use Mask Layout 1 (or whatever is the BGR mask layout in the Reshade port). Make sure your Desktop Resolution is 4K. On the slang version of CRT-Guest-Advanced Mask 12 is the RRGGBBX Mask, I’m not sure which one it is on the ReShade port.
Here we go. Looks pretty good! This is 100% mask strength too.
EDIT: it does however create red artefacts on colours like yellow and white; especially on text. If I change the layout to RGB it’s mitigates it somewhat; but not entirely. Mask 9 doesn’t have it at all as a means of comparison. I took a picture but it doesn’t really show on my phone. My LG has BGRW; it’s one of the less straight forward ones…I am finding that you need to tailor settings per game!
FYI all settings in Reshade are the same, except in situations where you’d have negative values. So in a case where in Retroarch values would go from -10 to 10; in Reshade they’d go 0 to 20.
So in this instance, the parameters you mention are the same.
Yeah I’m seeing this behaviour in Reshade. So you can get the same look by setting Reshades preprocessor resolution to whatever the game is running at (which usually almost completely removes the effect) and then use the downsample internal resolution setting - or, just set Reshades resolution to the equivalent resolution of what the down sampling does. Exact same effect; but the shader isn’t having to do any work and you maintain FPS
As far as I know all LG WOLED TVs use an RWBG layout until the G5. Are you sure it’s BGRW? Also, I don’t think CRT-Guest-Advanced’s BGR layout actually starts on Red. It’s actually RBG but of course individual Mask Layouts could vary.
You can take a look at these threads and posts if you want to dig deeper into the topic:
Lastly for some photo tips:
Be sure your camera is stable. Use Pro/manual mode. Speed 1/60 or 1/30. ISO 100-400. WB 4000K - 5000K or Auto. Focus Manual or Auto.
According RTINGS it’s RGBW but all 4 are never on at the same time. However the images they have of the sub pixels are confusing; they look like WBGR to me but also I can see a dark green sub-pixel and a fluorescent green sub-pixel; so I have no idea what I’m looking for, probably
@guest.r I’ve had this in mind for a long time
why not using “scale_x6 = 0.25”? or “scale_x7 = 0.50” if “scale_x6 = 0.50” need to be like this
I asked this because, based on my limited knowledge of shaders, the video will be enlarged to double size horizontally, which might require more processing power
This was an option indeed some years ago, but users kept using the 2x scaling option, since it was still available.
Default scaling options also allow better scanline dynamics and artifacting/fringing manifestation. Pixel transition would also be compromised to a degree with the actual LPF…
I guess it’s needles to say what the original standard NTSC resolution is, this all is accounted into ntsc-adaptive pass scaling.
There aren’t too many passes which would benefit from a speedup, it’s not worth to sacrifice quality.
TL;DR current implementation brings better quality regarding the whole ntsc composition.
I did play with it and yes I get less quality/sharping
well I was looking for a way to get some speedups since I cant use crt-black_crush-koko with 4x resolution (seems it will eat all the VRAM), and this speedup seem make it work but as you said it will do “sacrifice quality.”
Wow, I can’t even imagine how many updates I missed out on during the months I’ve been gone, right away I went and just grabbed the last latest update and just dove right in blindly and whipped up a crazy new look, definetly plan to tweak further just throwing something out there real fast.
Right off the bat the very first two highlights I see is this new Interlaced mode 5 and this new “fonts” setting for ntsc that finally cleans up those fuzzy looking letters on 2phase games, those two new settings alone changed the game, amazing.
Here’s a couple screenies:
Interlaced 480i content and that’s Streets of Rage Remake screenies just to throw that out there:
Some before and after pics of the font setting off and then with it activated:
You can see that poster on the wall with the garbled graphics now looks clean.
I can’t believe I can finally get the colors to pop correctly with this new Interlaced setting. One thing I did notice though with the font setting is that whole it does fix the fuzzy letters, whenever a screen fades out the “fuzziness” comes back for a split second before the screen changes completely.
Here’s an example:
Here’s when the screen is fading:
You’ll notice that middle line between the “W” becomes “fuzzy” again right before the screen completely fades out, happens really fast though.
While I got some time I’m gonna get in the lab and try to whip up a new pack maybe put up a sample pack in my thread to start the new year off, my old pack really needs to be replaced asap.
Here’s a couple more screenies:
Hope everyone’s been good.
Heey @sonkun! Nice to see You back! Meanwhile some noise options have been added for more messy (RF) presets. Hope You stay a while and continue with you awsome tweaks…
