New CRT shader from Guest + CRT Guest Advanced updates

[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.

[guest.r]

New Release Version (2025-01-12-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.
• New: some refinement on the effect, originally the sampling was point-like, producing very cut transitions (Sonic waterfall mountains…), now it’s more like sharper-linear.
• Edit: small update

Download link:

https://mega.nz/file/JgRAFbLQ#oI-xGgA7XhwkOySPs2BQE5thZY3ImPcX3GgWHai41Ec

Current state of the ‘feature’:

OFF:

ON:

[sonkun]

Late to the party and this newer update but right away let’s get into some testing. @guest.r I think I remember what the professor was talking about with the waterfall effect, first here’s vanilla guest-ntsc:

Then here’s with the edges color setting on 10:

Is that how it’s suppose to look with all those small red areas on his body appearing like it’s “coming through” the waterfall like that? At first I tried it with my presets and thought that was happening because of all the different settings I was using but that even happens here on the vanilla shader as well.

[guest.r]

I wouldn’t mind these situations too much. If pixels exsist as a part of the original graphics, then it’s quite possible they are detected by the edge detecting algorithm and they become “the original color”. The heuristics involved aren’t too complicated, but i like the results in general.

[RetroGames4K]

Your last update looks sharper, I love the way it looks. Thanks for the great Job you are doing!!!

[Jobima]

Hi

is “Gamma correct” in “BRIGHTNESS SETTINGS” has bug? see the artefacts/artifacts below

I need it since it help make the image closer to https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1497359045203738628

[guest.r]

No, it’s not a bug of the Gamma Correct setting, just some NTSC artifacts are becoming visible. It’s funny you picked this up too, i had allready some cleanup code ready at a point, but wasn’t released. If you lower the number of NTSC Taps, this should be greatly mitigated or go away anyway.