New sonkun crt guest advanced hd presets thread

I won’t be home for a good few hours to test those settings. Mind posting a screenie?

just edited above—

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That’s definitely a interesting take, makes it look even more vintage and fuzzy looking. Ok then, I wonder what this new experiment guest.r is currently working on will bring to the table.

What setting is “g_MD_Pal”, a setting in grade?

the mega drive palette fix. I think this comes by default in BlastEm core though. The palette is a bit different there than GPGX.

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Ah ok. Also I notice you’re going more for a really “bad rf signal” look, I’ve come to learn that a clean rf look can be achieved as well at least from what I seen in some videos. I think I’m leaning more towards the cleaner look.

If its expected to get best Composite video & RF results, they have to have as many artifacts as possible, specially since RF.

I used to have one Genesis RF cable that had so much static, the so called Noise in here that you get overall issues to see the overall screen pixels. Aside of the dithering you get by default. But this was because the Pin cables were so badly damaged that couldn’t fit properly in the RF plug.

I had another of these RF cables but with just 1-2 pins that connected this way to the console, but it was Composite video being connected to TV. There was no Noise at all.

Be that as it may, RF is meant to have bad image quality.

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Believe me when I say I know all about those bad rf days, I had the snes and genesis both hooked up to two tvs sitting side by side to each other playing with my brother back in 91. He was a Nintendo fanboy and I’m a Sega whore until the day I die so we played both Sonic and Mario World next to each other trying to outdo and show which system was better while both of us being impressed by both games, bad rf signal and all lol.

I guess I’m just trying to switch things up a little bit here.

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If there’s something I could appreciate these days about presets and the wonderful type of work guys like you do, is to give some more love to RF presets.

It’s a bit confusing that there’s way more content about RGB rather than RF that is the most basic way to play these 90 games. It’s like the most fundamental way to play them back them, aside of the CRT TV looking.

If there’s something I think could be missing around here, its those video signal artifacts (Not rainbow) that only disturb video image and make them look so much worse. The Noise feature is good but not enough I think to bring actual justice to how Bad an RF signal can look into these games…

I mean, in the name of nostalgia!

Composite video gives sort of bad screen image because the dithering but RF is on a next level I think.

I still do have a Nintendo console with RF hooked up, even on a 1920x1800 screen and I still can see big artifacts with Rainbow colors but not like with Genesis games. The static is overall around the screen image. This is a whole different level of blurry bad image screen. This could potentially give a way better looking of the old experience. Just my opinion.

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I’m considering everything you’re saying in these posts, kind of makes me want to retweak and dirty up my rf presets when I get home later and put out a new pack. Its true that every 8 and 16 bit system I’ve owned in the early 90’s came prepackaged with the rf cable, it was pretty much standard in the US. I only started using composite on actual hardware when PlayStation and Saturn came on the scene along with all the other systems that followed after them.

For now though I’m just waiting to see what guest.r is about to present to us, sounds like he’s going to switch some things up concerning the md rainbow setting or maybe something else entirely. If I’m not home before he releases it hopefully you’ll test it out before me.

if there is something even greater to give more 90s old school experience, would be adding up more Love in these projects for RF looking. That’s just my opinion. Like said above, Noise is Good but not enough.

RF by default, SHOULD BE the way to play these classic consoles but there’s so little content to find around, though… and of course, effects to embrace that experience. At least with the Mono output and very low Output rate in options, this is greatly achieved for audio department, at least.

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I appreciate this conversation, thank you. I forgot you were the one that even got me started on going for the “mega drive rainbow” look months ago so you’ve been helping me along this journey for a while now. I’ll see how things go later when I get back in the lab, might even go with your settings above who knows. The RF presets will become my guinea pig to experiment on, gonna drag it through the mud and see how bad I can make it look lol.

you’re the hero on here bud :grinning:

I just have a very modest camera to record, but this is some proof of what I say, with NES Kirby’s Adventure.

Even on a 1920x1080 flat screen, there’re plenty of Screen artifacts with RF cable, even to this day.

Not sure how much can you see. I wish could get you here to see them :smile: There’re rainbow lines, but they’re all over the screen and with different angles. It’s different than Genesis games, that’s for sure.

But its what I try to say that RF BAD looking is on a next level compared to Composite video. Yet, a bit surprised how very little content is about RF on the forum

There’re 3 videos in there as a proof:

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See look at that I was even around in that thread back then too lol. But yes I saw the videos. I’ll try some things out later though, let’s wait on guest.r first in the meantime.

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Great update as always, sonkun. The 1440p presets look really nice on my computer.

Unfortunately, I’m here to report about the Xbox again :sweat_smile:. The colors now look hosed up on Series S through D3D11

However, by playing around with the settings, I found out that the issue seems related to Phosphor/Diplay Color Space. Setting Diplay Color Space from -1/709 to 0/sRGB fixes the corrupted colors, but also makes the colors slightly darker, so it’s not quite the ideal fix. Any ideas of what could be causing this?

By the way, do you have any recommended settings combination for playing Dreamcast? Or plans to make a VGA preset for systems like it? I’m currently using Aperture Grille + S-Video with Flycast set to TV Composite, but I’m wondering if there’s anything better for it.

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You’re the one that messaged me on reddit about this same issue lol? If so I was trying to ask you if the Xbox had some display/Video setting that would let you change the color space or something of the sort. I honestly don’t know what’s causing that craziness and I don’t play on Xbox at all. I would like to know though as I have a feeling other xbox users might be coming here to ask this very same question.

Switching to Srgb seems to be a “fix” but it indeed darkens the colors especially on dark background games so it’s not really a fix, that’s the reason why I switched to rec 709 in the first place plus my setup uses that color space as well.

For Dreamcast I just use composite or rgb. I thought about using that “doublelined” setting in the interlaced settings (forgot the exact name of it but it turns 480i content into 240p which gives a game like MVC2 scanlines), only reason I didn’t is because it makes some 240p content look funky where the scanlines look weird on some games. It’s been a while since I used that setting though.

@guest.r do you have an idea on what could be causing that? Then again this could be some issue with the grade shader just like that black screen contrast issue from before.

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It’s reproducible with d3d11 drivers on Windows machines. There must be some lines of code which don’t get properly translated to D3D HLSL, as OGL/Vulkan GLSL and D3D HLSL have their own sets of oddities.

It’s known that HLSL and GLSL handle matrices differently, most probably it something related to these.

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Oh wow Windows as well? If @JosepMC is the same person that messaged me on Reddit he also said that the colors displayed correctly using my old preset pack from March using that same driver.

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I’m not whoever messaged you on Reddit, I can also confirm your presets from March didn’t display this behavior. If it can’t be resolved on D3D11, then so be it; I can always stick with the presets from March for that. I’m merely reporting the issue in hopes that it can be addressed. I like using the Xbox as an emulation machine; using your presets from far away from the TV and while lying in bed makes for a pretty comfy gaming experience. :grin:

Thanks for the tips about Dreamcast. I think I’ll stick to S-Video for the time being, as a solid compromise between the sharpness of RGB and the blending of composite.

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The blue on mega man and the blue on sonic look almost perfect to what they look in their modern games today. However, mega man in the nes picture doesn’t look the same as the mvc picture. Even though the teal looks brighter, and the blue looks darker I suppose you can call this Nes nuances.

What is the color palette that you are using for the nes?

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Since that wasn’t you I guess that makes you xbox user number 2 to tell me about this lol. Does the Xbox series x/s have some kind of display/Video setting that let’s you change the color space?

A quick Google search shows me this? I haven’t played on xbox so I don’t know how the video settings look. Or maybe the latest RetroArch release has some new video setting that needs to be tweaked that could possibly fix it?

Nice. That’s exactly what the S-Video presets were made for.

You’re right. Even in the raw image the the “blues” slightly differ from each other.

I doubt Capcom were trying to keep an exact 1 for 1 consistency in colors with a Mega Man sprite from 1988 to a Mega Man sprite from 1998.

In Mesen I use the Original Hardware pallete, it’s the only pallete I’ll ever use and what I suggest everyone else to use if using my presets. My presets were pretty much tailored with that pallete.

On another note I’m thinking if I should dial in a little more overall brightness, was thinking of adding a little more “gamma correct”. I have it set to 1.50 was thinking of raising that up to 1.60 or somewhere around there. Maybe you guys can try it out yourselves and see if that’s a good idea.