New CRT shader from Guest + CRT Guest Advanced updates

Grade should work quite nice when replacing the first stock pass, you can get a nice performance saving with this setup. OTOH both Grade and Glass can be added at the end of the shader composition. Glass is mandatory at the late side of shaders.

I’m sorry I meant glass, not grade. I go back and forth if I like using Glass. I have not been able to use it with venom advanced other than the last pass with linear.

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I like using GTU pass 1 and 2 with Venom Advanced. I can get it fairly close to an S-Video output with color smearing but have a little more control over resolution blur to make it closer to my memory instead of reality. Also does anyone else remember this terrible game? I was stuck with it for a few months as a kid and could never get anywhere.

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Venom advanced also looks great on my PC, CRT monitor. It rounds off the ends of the pixels making everything chunky and pleasing to look at.

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Oh man, yes Deadly Towers!

I had exactly the same experience, I could never figure out how to get any farther than a couple of screens. :weary:

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Hi @guest.r

I was wondering if it’s possible to mod “pre-shaders-afterglow.slang” so it can be used independently with other shaders. I want to use the “raise black level” feature (with crt-royale and the old version of guest-dr-venom) because your implementation produces a much more desirable result than image-adjustment.slang and img_mod.slang :grin:

EDIT: If it’s not possible, please consider releasing your own version of image-adjustement shader someday. It will benefit a lot of people!

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Currently grade is considered to be a very complete color adjustment pre-shader. It has quite a lot of functionalities, including “black level”. It can be used as the first shader in the setup with very good results.

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Currently grade is considered to be a very complete color adjustment pre-shader. It has quite a lot of functionalities, including “black level”. It can be used as the first shader in the setup with very good results.

I didn’t know that! Thanks for the tip :grin:

EDIT: By the way, I want to provide my use case for “raise black level”: Games with inconsistent black bars. (Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, etc) I can’t hide them because the black bars appear through out the game inconsistently. In such cases, raising the black level would add shader effects (scanlines, textures) to the otherwise pure black areas of the picture. This makes the black bars much much more tolerable. :grin:

Just tried grade.slang and it probably can’t do what I want.

I believe your “raise black level” somehow works very differently. I can use very aggressive settings and still get vibrant colors with your shader. It seems only black is affected, which is what I want. With the other color shaders (grade, image-adjustment, etc), the whole picture would appear very washed out/greyish when I need a more prominent effect :sob:

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I noticed the bsize parameter is always slightly darkening the edges of the picture, even at its max 700.

If I force it to 10000 in the preset I get the clarity back. It was quite noticeable on x68000 command prompt drive letter.

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It’s mostly beneficial, since an anti-aliasing effect takes place on borders with curvature, looks nicer in general.

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I’m more than likely being dense here but what control(s) affect the mask strength of the Lottes masks?

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Lottes maskLight and Lottes maskDark.

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CRT-Guest-Advanced for ReShade :

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Thanks for that, so what would full mask strength be? I’m trying to see what I can do to mitigate brightness drop when using masks on my OLED. You can force HDR mode which messes with the colors but keeps brightness high and wanted to try full mask strength on the Lottes masks.

Would ideally like @Nesguy to make a preset actually of what he would like to have the shader set to if brightness was no concern.

The issue I always seem to have is not so much outright brightness loss, but perceived contrast/color saturation loss.

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On my monitor the best I could do is Lottes maskLight = 0.50 and Lottes maskDark = 0.00

You can try that.

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Lottes maskLight = 1.00 and Lottes maskDark = 0.00 results in accurate rgb values for the phosphors (i.e., “full strength”).

@cobhc2016

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Hi, @guest.r.

When do you intend to release the final version of your shader?

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Never, always work to be done kek.

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Since there are no bug reports and new functionalities got implemented in a ok manner compared with the latest repo version i’m taking a break with further improvements. It took much effort for this ‘current’ version and it would take a lot of perspective for another streak. :upside_down_face: Anyway thanks and regards for nice feedback and suggestions. :partying_face:

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