You can raise the ‘black level’ with the grade shader currently, but i need to check a bit how it goes with other effects. Although it’s not hard to add.
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If possible, it will be one more good feature, a plus.
Thanks.
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Yeah this is a nice feature to sort of add “texture” to the fully black areas. Originally it was not working in the old Guest-DrVenom because it would break the afterglow (I think the afterglow was looking for 100% black), but since the afterglow has changed, I’m not sure if this problem exists in the new shader.
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Yea it was very much an issue with the afterglow.
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It’s better to have afterglow with mask or/and scanline effect or without it? Glow is without both, but dunno about afterglow. And also about masks and black level.
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In the examples where I’ve seen close shots with afterglow it seemed like the mask was visible on it, here are some of the examples I found
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I guess it went smooth: 
Need to integrate in all three versions though and it’s getting late. Will make a release tomorrow. Hopefully will be ok.
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Scanlines being visible on black just means the monitor is poorly calibrated (i.e., brightness is up too high).
afterglow/trails should have the mask visible on top, since it’s caused by phosphor rolloff/decay.
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I think it was common in most tvs tbh, the brightest being set too high, probably not from manufacturer but by owners lol.
It’s because the CRT is calibrated wrong, but hunterk already mentioned this. Nice reference photos, though!
Edit: I’m not sure those are the scanlines. That looks like the slotmask structure. The scanlines are actually the very faint vertical lines, can’t even see them in some places.
Pac-man was a game where the monitor was rotated 90 degrees.
I also saw these lines on Crazy Taxi. Unfortunately I don’t have the photos anymore…
Yeah those faint lines would be part of the slotmask, you can tell by looking at the direction the phosphors are rotated. The scanlines are running vertically through the image because the monitor itself is rotated in the arcade cab. It’s actually easier to see the scanlines in the thumbnail; they’re very faint.
If the scanlines themselves are visible w/black, then the CRT is calibrated wrong and/or is going bad.
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A test version for adding black levels, currently only normal preset. I’ll need a popular vote i think, since it can look crappy, exposing uneven scanline weights at 1080p and non integer scaling - with higher levels. Opinion on afterglow would also be nice, currently with masks and without scanline effect, but both can be added.
https://mega.nz/file/B0pkQQxQ#2TA2nM0GnvTUOEZ-utaWaQXf-ObDyOes9Inrls6SHXE
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Thanks for the update with the smart edge handling, I think it’s really next-gen 
Will you be considering to implement the smart edge handling for the hires and ntsc versions too? Would be great, as this feature now provides incredible flexibility to find the personal preference between a crisp picture with nice enough smoothing.
I noticed btw that with the latest update (from quote above) that scanlines are not even anymore with the hires shader in some cases, this while RA has integer scaling to ON. Strange thing is that it doesn’t seem to happen everywhere in the picture (for all color scanlines). It’s quite noticable though on a blue background, see snapshot below. I tested the hires version with the PUAE core and integer scaling in RA ON. I tested various core options also, but no difference for the blue background. I can’t recall this seeing happening with previous versions.
The pattern is that every other scanline is more rounded, versus every other being more quare.
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Could you also test it:
- with shader built in integer scaling
- with D3D11
I might have some suspicions.
I think this is a good hint. It gets quite harder and more time consuming to support more pixels, and the hires/ntsc version would need much more to function properly where it should.
No difference with built in integer scaling and no difference with D3D11 (also tested Vulkan and GLCore, same issue).
The strange thing is that I’m -not- noticing uneven scaling on any other games with the PUAE core. I’m now suspecting this might be an issue with the PUAE core itself for this specific game (?)
Maybe leave it for now, if I find any other instance with uneven scaling I’ll post a shot and we can investigate further. But otherwise it may be better to consider this an issue with the PUAE core. I’ll try PSX later on also.
I see. No worry I think the hires and ntsc version look great, but now that we’ve seen what’s possible with the smart edge handling I was just eager to see it supported in the other versions as well
Thanks anyway for the feature in the regular version, I consider it a milestone improvement to the shader as I could finally blend pixels in certain instances without sacrificing the sharpness of the whole screen. Really well done
EDIT: Did some further testing with the PSX, SNES and MAME cores and didn’t see the scaling issue I mentioned earier, so that one issue I encountered must be something related to the PUAE core.
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Standard shader config + “raise black level: 6.00”. Very subtle.
It’s how I remember when I played on CRT TVs from 90’s: the black isn’t completely black, pure.
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LK Looks good, What Mask are you using?
I’m also wondering in general if the glow should be over or under the mask, I’ve noticed in some screen shots it seems to be showing up with patterns from the screen
You can see some other close shots from the NEC XM29 Plus where I found this one here:
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I believe that’s the internal reflection from the glass reflecting back onto the phosphor grid. My XM29+ has righteous internal reflections, and it looks like that one does, too. (I assume it’s because the glass is very thick)
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Ah, that would make sense with how wide the glow is, and how it doesn’t have RGB components in it, and that it’s mostly whitish
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