New sonkun crt guest advanced presets thread

Ok, I will try to change that value, but it is true that viewing distance greatly affects how you see one shader or another. I have a j4125 minipc connected to the 65-inch TV, but I don’t know if it can handle your shaders.

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True indeed, I play about 7-8 feet away from mines.

Yes you should try it on that to see the differences, I would like to know what you see as well.

Hello Sonkun. I haven’t been able to test the shaders on the TV yet, but on the monitor lowering that parameter that you told me has been quite useful, although I think it should be accompanied by an increase in contrast…what parameter should I touch this time in search of balance? Thanks again!

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No problem and for contrast you have three options this time at the top, one called “crt contrast” and just a bit further down from that is just “contrast” and “contrast pivot”. You can try playing with those until you get desired results. This got me thinking if I should make extra presets for the smaller tv/monitor size crowd with lower brightness adjustments. Can you post a pic and settings you used after you finish making your adjustments?

Hello Sonkun. Finally, just touching the “contrast pivot” parameter to 0.25 (more or less) achieves an effect along the lines of what I wanted. The first screenshot is the default slotmask shader 42, the second is with that value changed:

The question now is that, when playing so close to the screen, some type of smoothing is necessary to reduce the sharpness somewhat. When you are further away from the screen it is not necessary, but from so close you don’t see it well (it is very noticeable how what you see changes when you move away or get closer to the screen).

The result is better now, but it lacks that touch of softening to make it comfortable for me to look at.

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Nice, and all you did was change one setting. For the “smoother” look try raising the “Horizontal Filter Range” setting to about 1.30 or until desired under the “Filtering Options”.

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Hey sonkun. I have been using your presets for a while and have to say they are awesome! I ocasionally mess with the parameters, but I really don’t know what I’m doing. Recently I tried to “fix” something, but unfortunately couldn’t achieve what I wanted, so I thought maybe you could give me some pointers as to how to proceed.

The thing is, I love the overall look of the crts, but the flaws not so much. So I’ve been tinkering with your presets trying to keep the appearance as much as possible while removing the more aggressive artifacts and such.

This is original-presets\aperture-grille\flat-screen\1080p\neutral-composite-ntsc-2-phase. A wild shimmering happens when I use this one. And notice how the blue color leaks out of the letters, which doesn’t happen with neutral-composite-ntsc-3-phase:

Unfortunately this game only looks really good with composite-ntsc-2-phase. A lot of jagged pixels are visible while using other presets. Do you have any idea of what can I do to remove the shimmering and the “color offset”?

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Hello Millisar and welcome to the forum. Before we go further into your situation the first thing I noticed right away is that you’re using my previous old preset pack. I’ve done away with separate 2-phase/3-phase presets and went back to using the “guest ntsc shader” which chooses the appropriate “phase” for you automatically making things a lot easier to apply composite over any game you choose now. Please download my latest pack on the first page and give that a spin as I changed a few things up for this release. If you still see the same issue then report back so I can then help you out.

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actually with your latest pack he can change the ntsc to mixed to eliminate dot crawl

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I completely forgot all about that new setting. I personally wouldn’t advise it since I’m more of a “purist” but hey let’s see what he says and how he feels about it when he comes back with his findings I guess.

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Ah yes, the new version worked. I just had to reduce the artifacts NTSC artifacts and fringing. Jojo is finally looking beautiful and less flickery. There is still a minor issue. Some kind of an horizontal pixel spreading. This one in the previous version’s composite-3-phase I could remove by lowering either composite sharp or composite artifacts, I don’t remember which. How can I remove this in the current version?

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Nice, glad you’re getting things the way you want it. For that issue there I’ve already maxed out the “ntsc chroma scaling/bleeding” setting so the only other option might be what the user above suggested to use the “mixed” ntsc phase setting. I just tried it and it made those little artifacts dissapear right away.

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I’ve found the option and changed to mixed. It worked! Thanks you two!

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You can mitigate this (in any of the phase modes) by increasing the “NTSC Chroma Scaling / Bleeding” parameter.

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No problem and you’re welcome. Just a quick heads up take notice when using that mixed setting. I ran a test on Ninja Gaiden NES using standard 3-phase then the other using the mixed setting and these were the results.

3-phase:

Mixed phase setting:

In the mixed phase shot things look “smeared”. Look at the windows in the background, the 4 black holes that’s suppose to be there looks like it turned into one long rectangular shape and that’s just one example in the pic. There’s other differences scattered about if you look back and forth.

It’s a cool setting but I’d personally just stick to the two separate phases and deal with the bit of chroma scaling/bleeding that’s still there.

I’ve already got that setting maxed out in all my ntsc presets.

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Keep it coming, Sonkun. I hope one day you’ll be able to do reshade, sir. I’m loving these updates.

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Is this in the new update you sent out last week?

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Yeah Reshade is on my hit list down the line.

Yes it is. I didn’t use mixed settings though.

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Mixed mode is very nice for games which tend to trigger 2-phase blending and have a lot of (checkerboard) dithering present (Amiga games…). Games which already trigger 3-phase processing (NES…) have less horizontal resolution and it’s usually better to continue with 3-phase unless the user wants to blend dithering, bars…

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Thank you for clarifying its use. I did notice when using “mixed” with Sonic (2-phase) the image looked clear but not necessarily smeared like it does on that Ninja Gaiden pic. Using this information I guess it’s best to use the mixed setting on 2-phased games if you want to sharpen things up a bit more/get rid of chroma scaling/bleeding

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