Look under the “[ FILTERING OPTIONS ]”. Different shader variants have different options here, but it’s the place to look in you want to adjust pixel sharpness or smoothness.
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Thanks for the advice, do you have any particular item you can recommend? I would like to use your standard Guest Advance as a reference shader. Maybe there is some guide to your shader entries, so I can study them?
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It should be enough for most configurations to adjust the horizontal sharpness and substractive sharpness:
Horizontal sharpness // This setting determines the overall image sharpness mostly. Higher values create a sharper image.
Substractive sharpness // This is a nice "hack" that may be used in combination with "horizontal sharpness". Higher values give more sharpness to pixels and mask.
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Well I’ve come out of my comfort zone and given CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC (via HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader) another try and I must say that I’m really impressed!
When I first tried Slot Mask shader presets I didn’t get through the first time either.
So these tools are a bit technical and require a bit of time and understanding until mastery.
I don’t think that there’s any need to rewrite any NTSC Shaders from the ground up.
Thanks again for these amazingly awesome works of art!
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Hello Guest, first of all happy holidays to you and to the whole community, and thank you always for your work and your availability. Thanks to your advice I found exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately however, with the Mega Bezels I have some performance problems in its standard form and without reflection, the ideal would be to use the potato preset, where I have seen your gdv-mini being used. Would there be some way to act on horizontal sharpness and subtractive value on this preset, even accessing with text file? A thousand thanks.
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Specifically my question is related to the work of Duimon, where his preset potatoes only use the gdv-mini.
The parameter name is “Horizontal sharpness”, it works differently as with other shaders and there is no substractive sharpness. More is still more sharp and less parameter value more smooth though.
Best look at the bottom part of the parameters for it.
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I’ve been using the Blend Mode setting and I love the way Blend Mode 1 can make completely new colours in Turbo Duo games, without lowering the resolution as much but the Blend mode 1 seems to bleed colours outside of “lines” a bit much. Is there anyway I could dial it down a bit to find a comfortable middle ground?
I generally like my Turbo Duo to look sharp but this complete and perfect blending of dither patterns intrigues me.
I’ve adjusted the Adaptive Sharpness to -5.5. Don’t want to go overboard with Sharpness to introduce too many unwanted artifacts though.
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Hi Guest, last question for you. I’ve now found my comfort zone with your shaders together with the Mega Bezels, and I’m missing one last piece. I had seen in some of your past posts that you shared a list with all the mask types your shader uses and what exactly they do, but I lost track of that post and can’t find it again. Could you please re-share this, and what would you recommend I use on a 1080p to have a good “TV” experience and a good “Arcade” experience with such a monitor? A thousand thanks.
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Okay, now I get it. As resolution scaling goes up, Colour Bleeding goes down. Pretty neat.
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With gdv mini you can essentially use most masks. With guest-advanced best 1080p masks are masks:
- 0.0, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 9.0
It’s really hard to tell someones preferences in ahead, so it’s necessary for the user to try them in first person.
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I think this is the info you are looking for:
-1.0: no mask
0.0: a dense magenta-green mask
1.0: Lottes RGB mask with a some sort of slotmask
2.0: Lottes RGB mask
3.0: Lottes - a bit enlarged and shifted RGB mask
4.0: Lottes - 2x enlarged and shifted RGB mask, looks nicer with 4k+
5.0: a dense magenta green mask (trinitron mask controls)
6.0: RGB mask (trinitron mask controls)
7.0: BW mask (trinitron mask controls)
8.0: BWW mask (trinitron mask controls)
9.0: magenta-green-black mask (trinitron mask controls)
10.0: RGBX mask (trinitron mask controls)
11.0: Red-Yellow-Cyan-Blue mask (nice for 1440p+)
12.0: Red-Magenta-Cyan-Green mask (similar to 11.0, but for BGR panel layout)
13.0: RRGGBBX mask (looks nice with 4k+)
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Thanks a lot guys, you’ve been a great help.
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Hi @guest.r, a quick question: could you add the Internal Resolution (the very first one) function of the HD version to the standard version too?
I like to use it for some sort of blending, but I’ve found the standard and the HD version to be quite different out of the box, as the latter seems to eat a noticeable amount of detail, due to its thicker lines. I’ve tried messing with sharpness and other things to resolve the problem, but with no success, so I would like to have the best of both worlds.
Here’s an example of what I mean, standard first, HD second, default settings (look at the outline and the effects of the ship, the number on the left, the details and the lines of the metal structure).
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Try lowering the “sharpness detail” setting and see if that helps. I literally put that down to zero to bring certain pixel details “back” that don’t show out of the box with default settings.
I remember someone on the discord server brought that to my attention playing Super Mario Bros 2 on nes when I first switched over to the hd shader, on the first stage inside the building where the vine is that you climb a user pointed out that part of the left side of the vine the pixels appeared to look dim. After I noticed that I couldn’t un see what they saw until I fixed it by lowering that setting. You also get some soft blending as well the lower you put that setting so it also gives you what you want there as well.
Try it out and see if it helps under the filter settings, although everything I mentioned was about the hd version I assume that should work on the standard or even ntsc version as well.
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This is a tricky one, since the standard version uses 6 original pixels for horizontal blending and it’s a fixed number. It’s more then enough for standard emulation content though.
The HD version had this completely reworked and can read much more pixel, also has different blending logic. This is very useful when dealing with higher resolution content. And the ‘internal resolution’ feaure completely bases/depends on it.
You can tweak the horizontal sigma to like 0.35 and substractive sharpness to 0.5 in the HD version, then it should look more what you are after. The HD blending is a bit harder to setup, but is more versatile in the end.
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Thanks for the reply, understood! I’ve followed @sonkun’s advice and I’ve managed to get an almost identical image, I’ll look into those settings too then!
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Good evening Guest, I kindly need a clarification: what is Substractive sharpness ringing for? I brought this value to 1 together with the substractive sharpness, and I brought the horozintontal sharpness to 2.60. The results are spectacular for me and I took a cue from an old post of yours to get there, but I didn’t quite understand what I did. However beautiful, if one knows how to use your work he can do great things.
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I tried changing to Vulkan and updating the CRT Guest, but it said that the shader presets could not be loaded. What could be the problem? Steam version of Retroarch.
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Glad you found a nice combination of settings. Ringing: it’s something situational, mainly increasing the local contrast by highlightning or/and darkening colors on interpolation edges (where different colors meet). The image looks a bit sharper with this setting increased.
I didn’t recieve any error reports on non-working presets for quite a while now. You can re-download the shader pack from this thread and try to load the presets from the zipped folder. It’s probably some path issue.
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