Screenshots are perfect thanks for posting. Go with 2340x1080 for 1080p presets, those look the way Shadow Mask is intended to look at that resolution. How does the 1440p preset look with 3120x1440 resolution? I assume they’ll look just as good as the 1080p one.
Nice. Hmm, the mask looks a little chunkier than I would like. I say stick with the 1080p one for now.
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Lower output resolution is also better for battery life.
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Thanks for the responses. The reason I was messing with retroarch on my phone is because I’m interested in getting a dedicated retro handheld such as the Retroid Pocket 5 or Ayn Odin 2. They both have a 1920 x 1080 display (5.5 - 6 inches) and I was trying to test out what it may look like on my phone before I bought one of those handhelds. Thank you both for your work. I love your shaders. Keep up the great work!
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Appreciate it and I hope you enjoy. I also gotta thank you as well because of this conversation I’m going to pick up a monitor that displays 2560x1440 tomorrow for dirt cheap just so I can fine-tune my 1440p presets.
My setup can display 1080p and 4k so I get hands on tweaking when dealing with those presets but with 1440p I’m left in the dark and just used values that indeed works for that resolution. But I also want hands-on tweaking with that resolution like the other 2 to really give it that sonkun touch.
Once I get it and if I have to make changes I’ll for sure be posting up a new pack strictly for 1440p users. I have a feeling ill be rearranging the Shadow Mask 1440p presets for sure, at least the mask settings.
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Just a noob question: Do if have to change any parameters when using content other then 240p like Dreamcast or GameCube etc If yes: Is there a “best settings for every system” chart?
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My presets are more like a “one size fits all” sort of thing, I don’t do system specific presets, maybe if I go for a more “authentic” look in the future I’ll go that route like Retro Crisis is currently doing.
For systems like Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2 etc those systems display a good number of games at 480i I believe so if you wanted to tweak any settings then I would say the Interlacing Options area would be your best bet. If you want to add scanlines to let’s say MVC2 for Dreamcast you can tweak the Internal Resolution setting for something like this:
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How did you do this?
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Put the “Internal Resolution” setting to 1.00 in the “Interlacing Options” area:
That one setting right there basically.
On another note I finally got my hands on this 1440p monitor and I’m testing out different Shadow Mask settings, I want to make the “dots” a bit smaller similar to my 4k and even 1080p presets. I’m not sure if I should stay on mask 10 or use mask 6 like I’ve used on the 4k presets.
I’m just trying to figure out all the different mask zoom etc combination settings I can use with mask 6 and 10 for 1440p at the moment.
So far I tried mask 6, size 2, zoom -2 Shadow mask 1, that one already looks like a good contender:
Might actually just use these settings depending on how other combinations look. @Specialt1212 this is how I want 1440p Shadow Mask to look on your phone at that 1440 resolution that you used the other day, or something like that.
Edit: Maybe these settings are better? mask 10, size 2, zoom -4, Shadow mask 1:
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After testing things a bit further with the new 1440p presets I decided to delete my latest preset pack that I just put out (11-06-2024) and revert back to my previous pack (10-29-2024) with those 1440p presets that I’ve already been using. Seems I actually had the right settings all along even the previous Shadow Mask preset settings.
I noticed I wasn’t properly seeing the RGB subpixels clearly with the new 1440p presets like I can with the previous presets, the RGB subpixel colors looked more “compressed” as I’ve gone back and forth comparing the new presets with the previous ones and for that reason I have decided to revert back to the way they originally were.
If anyone grabbed that pack that I just released (11-06-2024) please delete it and re download my previous one. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Someone on discord mentioned my old scalefx presets, made me curious since I haven’t used scalefx on my presets in months and haven’t tried it since I gave my presets a makeover:
Just messing around I guess.
If you want to try it I suggest using the scalefx version from the guest folder, you can find it in crt>shaders>guest>pre-scale-presets then choose “scalefx-horizontal”. With that scalefx version you’ll get fullspeed performance as if you were using my presets without it. Also disable the switchres shader in the parameters since it’ll now be under scalefx and not above it in the shader chain which causes a static “flicker” effect on the screen. Or just edit the switcres shader on top for everything to look as intended.
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Sorry for the delay, I only check the forums about once a month. I finally decided to take the plunge and purchase a Odin2 Portal on indiegogo. If I’m not mistaken they should ship in late December / early January so once I get the device I’ll test your shaders out and report back here. Thanks for all your hard work!
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Nice. I did quick search on it:
Was curious to what resolution it displays, should be interesting to see how my presets will look on it so I’ll be looking forward to your tests when it arrives.
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Here’s something for the holidays. Thought I’d go ahead and make a small sample pack of some upscaled presets. I ended up going with xbr-lv3 instead of scalefx, I was liking the results a bit better on that shader. I included presets for just composite and rgb in all 3 mask types in 1080p, 1440p and 4k:
Try the sample pack here:
After extracting the pack copy and paste presets of choice directly into just the shaders folder not shaders_slang.
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Ok round 2 of my upscaling preset experiments, still using the xbr-lv3 upscaler shader. In my pack above I noticed on the composite presets the outlines on sprites looked too thick, a simple fix for that was changing the scaling on the first ntsc pass in the shader chain.
Now it went from looking like this:
To this:
More composite screenies:
Try out the pack here:
Just like above after extracting the pack copy and paste presets of choice directly into just the shaders folder not shaders_slang.
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Ok here’s round 3 of me experimenting with these upscaling shaders. This time we’re going in a slightly different direction using the ddt-xbr-lv1 shader. It seems to work a bit different compared to the xbr-lv3 shader that I used in the previous two packs as it looks to “clean” up the pixel edges more than “smooth” them out. The results are that pixels look closer to their original look but with the edges cleaned up giving a really clean looking image overall. Let’s compare.
Here’s xbr-lv3:
Ddt-xbr-lv1:
Here’s my standard rgb preset:
Ddt-xbr-lv1 looks more like my rgb preset but “cleaned up”.
More examples in the same order:
Here’s an example just comparing xbr-lv3 with ddt-xbr-lv1
With xbr-lv3 Mario’s eye has this weird slanted that connects to his mustache, although the over image looks smoother those are not how the pixels originally look. With ddt-xbr-lv1 the pixels look like their original look with the edges cleaned up to bring out that black outline more.
Another example:
Xbr-lv3 looks more smooth, ddt-xbr-lv1 looks more original.
Try the pack out here:
Copy and place presets in the shaders folder not shaders_slang.
These presets are a little more gpu intensive as well.
Edit: Just replaced with “version 2”, these should be faster now.
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Just a reminder, if mask mitigation is sponsored by magic glow, then an important factor is also the “Fine Glow/M.Glow Sampling”, which does lookups on a denser pixel grid, also acknowledging pre-scaling.
Ideally we would use FineSampling = 3.0 with a 3x pre-scaler. To compensate for sampling radius in this example, sigma values are to be multiplied by 3 as well as as Glow Radius.
Fine sampling was introduced with glow passes also to endorse magic glow mask mitigation setups which also include pre-scaling.
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Thank you. I’m learning all sorts of new information both here and on discord just because I randomly decided to go back into the lab and I’m loving it lol. By the way I just swapped out the link above with a new version 2. I changed the y2 scale from “viewport” to “source” and that gave the presets a performance boost. Also this ddt-xbr-lv1 shader is scaled at x1 compared to x3 that xbr-lv3 was on.
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New Version Release (12-03-2024-v2)
Changes Made
-
Still uses guest.r shader version 2024-10-27-r1.
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Adjusted sharpness on all presets
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Adjusted glow on all presets to go with new sharpness settings.
Kind of a small update nothing too major, wanted to shave a little bit off the pixel edges for a bit of a sharper look.
Basically we’re going from this:
To this:
Download the new pack in the first post.
Edit: Changed up the glow settings, didn’t like how they looked on the initial release, grab the new pack under “v2”.
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