Makes perfect sense then lol
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BTW, what’s the difference between Interlace 4 and 5 values? I’ve noticed by playing Cotton on Saturn that a certain effect wouldn’t be rendered correctly with 4, but worked well with 5. I have to try to reproduce it.
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Interlaced mode 4 is detail perserving while mode 5 merges the odd and even fields and produces a smoother effect, more faithful to interlacing.
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New Release Version (2023-04-06-r1):
Notable changes:
- Interlaced brightness adjustments, interlaced scanline strength now affects all modes.
- Small parameter description update, cleanup, minor speedup.
Download link:
https://mega.nz/file/194UQIwR#jH2ImxrA5HTl4YkqyhAhZ18rUQmdeDobWDo6EWZU2HA
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Well damn, wasn’t expecting it to come this fast. Let me check this out then, thank you for the update.
@guest.r goddamit you genius you, you gave me EXACTLY what I wanted. The fact that I can tweak brightness on the last interlace mode is everything I wanted. I can’t thank you enough for this. I got work to do now, should have my updated pack out with these new interlaced settings by later.
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Thanks, Sonkun. Yes, I have downloaded and installed your presets. I will give your presets another glance and post any questions or concerns over in your thread. I have a preset in place right now for my Playstation gaming, but I am always interested in anything that can be an improvement. Thanks again for the suggestion.
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Hi there, Hari. There isn’t any specific shader, per se, that I had in mind that I wanted to run. I was just trying to express how interested I am in seeing what CRT shaders can do and how each time I see what users can come up with it is always impressive. What works for me right now is running one of the Mega Bezel DREZ settings. I personally don’t like the look of upscaled models with pre-rendered backgrounds (even though they are smoother) like you find in the Resident Evil series. When using the DREZ shader with Mask 6 or 9 at native resolution I am able to find closest to what I find visually appealing, both in models and the on screen text. In Resident Evil 3 Jill’s shoulders can appear jagged and strange without a proper shader mask. I’m not quite familiar enough yet with adjusting most of the parameters to make the kind of changes and customization that much more experienced users able to do. So most days I like to just sit back, see what others come up with, and maybe play around with parameters a little bit at a time because sometimes I just feel lost or disheartened.
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Greetings @guest.r,
This is what happens when I switch between Blend Mode 0 & 1. Look at the lettering in the title screen and the letters in the HUD.
Blend Mode 0
Blend Mode 1
Blend Mode 0
Blend Mode 1
Blend Mode 1 blends transparencies like the Sonic The Hedgehog waterfalls.
Blend Mode 0 does not blend transparencies all else being equal.
If you look in the screenshots posted above you’ll see that when Blend Mode 1 is enabled, it seems to smear the colours and destroy some black or dark detail.
Is there any way for me to reign in the amount of smearing that takes place when using Blend Mode 2 while keeping the dithering and blending of transparency effects?
Edit:
Just adding this decent quality clip I saw with this same game in the beginning running on a real CRT for comparison purposes.
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Blend mode 1 is the passtrough default mode, blend mode 0 can be very nice with a prepended deditherer or even without it if you don’t have or want some situations.
I guess i know what you mean, sonic waterfall is a perfect example of this bad behaviour. 
/s
Ntsc shaders can do this in general, especially in 2-phase mode.
Horizontal sampling can be very wide, like 16 original pixels and while it can resolve dithering effects other “side effects” are produced.
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Hi @DreamOnNeon, my post was regarding this:
As someone on a lower end PC with an i7-6700 and a GT 1030 there is only so much that I can do with shaders and emulating Playstation games. There is talk about upscaling, supersampling, downsampling and other settings that my PC just isn’t strong enough to handle so I’m forced to rely on having no more than 2x upscaling
That’s why I posted some 4x upscaled screen from my config, that I think is a little weaker then yours… Later I will post some RE screens with some of my presets!
Hmmm…the reason I’m using an “NTSC” Shader is to avoid the undesirables of using a “dithering shader”.
There’s something else that I’ve recently noticed with the Sonic The Hedgehog waterfall blending using Blend Mode 1 and when the “rainbow” effect can be visible. I’ll post a screenshot of it when I get a chance. It looks like a sort of combing artifact but not the traditional zigzag pattern of combing. This looks more like a “straight” comb pattern where the differences in brightness between the odd and even scanlines make it look like the teeth of a wide toothed comb.
This only occurs when the screen is in motion, even when you look up and down and it causes the screen to scroll vertically.
Going back to the example I posted above, is there any 2 phase NTSC shader available that does this (blending and transparency) without such wide, horizontal artifacts or rather which creates the same or at least similar “bad behaviour” to when the original hardware is paired with a good ole CRT with composite or RF input?
Also, is this a goal to be continued to be striven for with this shader?
Alternatively, I haven’t really done much direct comparison to Blargg’s NTSC implementation, in particular the SNES variant but I know that that can be coaxed into doing some wonderful Blending and Transparency without the aforementioned horizontal artifacts and “overbleeding” of colours, alas, I haven’t figured out how to get rainbow artifacts using that implementation so there always seems to be something “missing” when trying to create the perfect NTSC recipe, at least for folk like me who don’t do much experimentation with prepending and appending of different shaders.
So what I thought might have been a “Silver Bullet” turns out to be similar to what I have experienced with any other solution I’ve tried before, especially with the main intended target of Sega Genesis dedithering.
Perhaps @Nesguy might be right after all and what might be needed is a revisit of NTSC shading from the ground up.
I do appreciate all your hard work and efforts in this regard though. This is the first shader I got rainbow effects working correctly as well as acceptable looking NTSC effects on NES, SNES, Turbo Duo and PSX games as well so it’s very well designed and an invaluable tool in my arsenal.
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Blend mode 0 is just an extra from the previous ntsc implementation. No need to use it if it’s annoying in any way. Blend mode 1 is the default one.
You can use the custom ntsc preset and then adjust artifacting to your liking, which should deal with “overbleeding”. Fortunately or unfortunately the blending coefs are precisely calculated and very hard to adjust.
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Okay, seems like I might be mixing them up. I’ll verify next PC session then update my posts if necessary to avoid further or future confusion.
Many of my replies are created using my cellphone post gaming session so there’s sometimes need for some editing.
Neither of them are annoying in any way though and I use one when I don’t need Genesis blending, transparency or Rainbow effects and the other when I do so both are valued and appreciated and not overshadowed by that one characteristic which I sought to have a better understanding of.
I have always been using the custom NTSC preset. I might have just switched it over to S-Video for those screenshots in particular to make a more representative and reproducible example.
I will continue my tweaking journey as per your advice.
Thanks for sharing your time and knowledge and for your continued support and positive energy which is something that goes a long way in this world.
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Open in a new tab/window and fullscreen
Upper left : Native res - no shader
Upper Right: 4x res - no shader
Botttom left: 4x res + shader
Bottom right: 4x res + shader + downsample (from guest’s shader)
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@guest.r Does the “mask layout” option work with all masks? It doesn’t seem to do anything when I’m using mask 6. Is mask 6 always BGR?
Also, I’ve noticed that the “triads” when using slotmask width 3 always go G, R, B. Is there a way to offset the mask by one pixel so the triads are B, G, R?
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It works with all masks besides 7 and 8, with my testing also with mask 6.
My slotmask setups go R, B, G. I changed it to B, G, R regarding slotmask and it broke @Cyber’s presets, so it’s RBG now with proper layout.
It could be that you are using the repo version of the shader, because fixes were made in this regard with (not in the repo yet) newer versions.
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Hi, thanks for your hard work. Noob question but is the version inside the retroarch shaders is approximaly up to date ? Thanks
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I believe this is the answer to your question. Exactly one post above yours.
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does anyone has the rgb and bgr subpixel layout?
Are you referring to the Mask Layout setting?
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