It’s mask mitigation, fauvoring the brighter edge, prolonging the effect. Usually the rule goes like brighter the color, weaker the mask strength applied, but perceptually not optimal in most cases.
Adding a non custom made effect like warpsharp would probably bring other side effects.
Taking the new setting for a quick spin just to see what it does.
So here’s my preset without the new mask mitigate setting:
And here’s with it cranked to the max just to see the effect it has:
From the first glance I see it does some kind of brightening on the edges of the masks especially in the darker areas, looks to “fill out” parts of the mask on the edges. Also seems to have an effect on sharpness as well.
So to get a basic understanding on how this new setting works is that the use of this setting, to help “flesh out” the mask edges?
If only I could go to someone’s house to see this stuff in action. lol Anyone on the East Coast?
Ultimately I just want my games to blur dithering properly while retaining sharpness, add the depth and texture to the backgrounds like CRTs do, and retain all the color pop of a properly calibrated TV.
The only consoles I didn’t sell off were my Genesis and Dreamcast, so those have been what I’ve been verifying side by side on my XBR960. I’ve tried any usermade preset I can find in these forums, a lot of presets really seem to wash out the colors for the games in comparison to how my CRT looks and I don’t quite understand why…but I’m too consciously ignorant to think anyone is doing anything wrong in their presets. It’s really amazing all the different ways these games can look and something I’m really respecting and loving about the emulation scene right now!
It’s having beneficial effects with situations, where there are gradual transitions between pixels, also regarding brightness.
Your presets use mask mitigation techiques like negative bloom and magic glow, along with sharp horizontal filtering, which doesn’t require much intervention. But you would probably be bothered if using different approaches.
The techniques which benefit most are standard mask strength, +bloom, +halation and mask bloom, -halation and magic glow, depends on bloom/glow sampling techniques.
One of prerequisites to successfuly apply this mask mitigation is, that mask have low visible impact on bright colors and strong appliance on dark colors. If someone, for example, is using lottes masks with default settings, it would not make much sense to apply it.
Looks better in the “fixed” on the bottom two images, but I think it looks worse on the top ones. Are the invader’s eyes supposed to look as if there is a line in the middle, and are there supposed to be whites left and right of each horizontal red line in the diagonal lines (especially noticeable in the red diagonal line that is right in the middle of the top right image).
I see. From your response it seems I may not even need this setting since I’m already using the glow/bloom etc the way I already have been using it. Nevertheless I’ll take all of this to the lab and play around a bit and see what kind of tweaks I can make.
Glad you took a look. “Bad stuff” is looking much less pronounced in general and on normal-sized sources. The test image is like 64x64 pixels, very usefull, but there is like 4x too much interpolation on the end screen. Nevertheless, i also did a small update with some tweaks.
Nice you are testing it out.
In general, it somehow doesn’t make too much sense if you don’t use masks at full strength (for beginning) with most of the mask mitigation techniques.
It’s definitely really cool to see it as an adjustable setting!
Not sure that guest.r’s change is similar to that VSM. In guest.r’s images black lines seem to get thinner, while in that wiki black lines get thicker with higher VSM option.
Yes, is why I said Inverted VSM. :o
New Release Version (2025-02-18-r1):
Notable changes:
Mitigate Mask on Edges functionality/parameter added (standard, ntsc, hd, fast versions).Download link:
https://mega.nz/file/Bph3jabA#YA9DghGun0y1MrXzwjjaUCw1zCbBjltsP-T2JlSxR4A
thanks, I already use Mitigate Mask on Edges with 0.5 in my preset
Did a quick test with that new setting and indeed 0.5 seems to be the sweet spot.
It’s now ‘safer’ to build presets with wider filtering, since there are means to compensate stronger mask application / falloff on brighter edges. Especially with the ntsc version, followed by HD.
Presets mostly benefit if the TVL is somewhat lowered. Here are two examples of mask 10 (RGBX) setups and edge mask mitigation:
Hey, these presets are looking beautiful. It’s good to see how high the bar has been raised for CRT Shader presets in general by all of the incremental updates over the years.
In other words, more accurate looks are becoming more of a norm rather than the exception!
Thanks again and keep up the great work!
Hey Guest & others I’m trying to get a BVM w/ Aperture grill style shader that will still show black scan line gaps.
I can do this really easily with default internal scaling on any core with the CRT Megatron shader.
However, when I try to up the internal resolution of a core, say like the PPSSPP to 8x, the beutiful scan line gaps disappear.
The device I’m trying to get to work is a 4k HDR phone, so the Megatron HDR support is really nice, but I’m looking fore alternatives that could still show the black gaps in between even at a high internal resolution.
Hyllian 3d is the best I’ve found so far, but I’d like to get the scan line gaps bigger
On my personal Megatron testing/playground build, i implemented a 1/2 vertical resolution scanline option a while back (along with a doublescan option for DOS games and such). I should be able to add options for additional divisors trivially. Let me take a look and see.
It won’t necessarily work as cleanly as you want it to tho. Ideally a PPSSPP option for downsampling back to native res would be needed.
Done, and it actually works beautifully when using (the decoupled) crt-guest-advanced-ntsc’s Internal Resolution setting as a downsampler. Fair bit of shimmer without that downsample effect tho.
Let me get this all buttoned up and i’ll share it as a preset pack/experimental build over in the Megatron thread later tonight or tomorrow.
