Ok I got you in a few minutes. I’m also gonna try a little tweak to my gamma settings and show you a before and after pic so you can tell me what you think. Be back soon
For reference, this is how I like my Sonic 1
Ok here we go, I even took my sonic shots in the same spot you got yours, let’s see what you think. First shot is with the settings from my crt mask 6 type preset that I showed in my first post:
and this is after I tweaked the gamma a little:
here’s Soul Caliber using crt mask 6 before:
and after:
before:
after:
here’s how it looks using my mask 5 preset settings
before:
after:
before:
after:
For this tweak, in the parameters I changed gamma input to 2.20, gamma out to 2.50, Target gamma to 2.20,Monitor gamma to 2.50 and brought the glow strength down to 0.06, may be better to just put it back to its default 0.02. I still see that your image looks a tad brighter though
5 Likes
I’ve got two questions if someone can help!
-
Why does my account keeps getting deleted? This is the third time I’ve created this account. Is it because when I created the accounts last two times I didn’t reply to any posts & just tried to log back in like a week later? Is this one is going to be deleted too?
-
Are we allowed to post ReShade screeshots from standalone emulators?
-
Accounts with no activity (that is, trust level 0 and no posts) get wiped after 2 days. This is to keep a handle on the number of spam accounts that get created (100+ each day) just to post a spammy link in their profile. Now that you’ve made a post, you should be safe.
-
It’s not forbidden, so sure, go for it, but I’d rather it doesn’t become a trend, either. If it starts getting out of hand, I’ll speak up.
1 Like
Thanks! Really appreciate your reply.
About question no. 2, I just wanted to show off my ReShade settings for interlaced games I worked on (maybe for too long) after getting inspired by this thread. Didn’t know where else to post them.
That’s it! I will stop after this.
Is there some way to incorporate this two tone magenta-green triad shadowmask effect into guest-dr-venom? Or perhaps there’s an easy cut & paste I can do to the code?
2 Likes
Yes, it can be made by replacing ‘mask 0’ code with this:
// Phosphor.
else if (shadowMask == 0.0)
{
pos.x = pos.x + pos.y;
pos.x = fract(pos.x*0.5);
float mc = 1.0 - CGWG;
if (pos.x < 0.5) { mask.r = 1.1; mask.g = mc; mask.b = 1.1; }
else { mask.r = mc; mask.g = 1.1; mask.b = mc; }
}
2 Likes
Looks really dark to me; might want to play with offset/gain/gamma, etc.
Recent experiments with a Samsung LED TV have just confirmed what I’ve long known to be the case, which is that shader settings are highly display-dependent and can look radically different from one display to the next.
That said, here are some tips:
Shaders cause a significant amount of lost brightness with their scanline and mask effects. Most shaders try to compensate for this through software, which results in clipping and an undesirable distortion of the colors.
The best way to compensate for the lost brightness is to crank up the display backlight as high as it will go, and disable most/all of the stuff in the shader related to color/brightness/contrast/etc. This way the original color values are unaltered.
First shader(s) on the stack should be everything related to color management. After that you can add NTSC emulation, if desired. Next comes blur, mask and scanlines. Adjust to taste.
Ideally, the mask will be as close to 100% strength as possible, but this causes a significant amount of lost brightness and so you’ll probably want to lower the mask strength a bit. You want the mask to be as close to 100% while still maintaining a bright and vibrant image. When choosing a mask pattern you’ll want to take into account the resolution and subpixel structure of the display you’re using. Most likely, one of the subpixel-respecting patterns will yield the best results.
Scanlines on a properly calibrated CRT are visible over all color intensities including 100% white, but the black gaps between lines will shrink over brighter colors. Almost all shaders emulate the beam width dynamics and allow you to adjust this to personal preference.
Blur should be adjusted so that vertical black lines still appear as vertical black lines at a normal viewing distance if you’re going for RGB or S-video. However, if you’re going for a composite video look, you’ll need a heavier blur than even bilinear filter. A gaussian blur will work in either case.
Gamma is either 2.4 or 2.5 for CRTs but can come up or down a bit more depending on display settings. I personally use a setting of 2.45 since I can’t decide which looks right 
Good luck, and happy tweaking!
You’re the best!
It’s a very nice pattern; results in a classic “triad” phosphor arrangement at the subpixel level. Might want to consider adding it as a parameter option or adding the alternate code as a comment.
3 Likes
I know it looks dark, I just set my monitor (max 300 nits btw) to 100% brightness when I use my shaders to play games. And turning up the brightness in the shader bleaches out the colors and causes nasty moire because of the minor amount of curvature I have to use to even get horizontal lines. Which if don’t use just gives me the aperture grille and no scanlines.
Also, I find it kinda funny that you think it looks dark, as it was your own posts earlier here that made me fall in love with darker masks & scanlines.
1 Like
I do agree that you’ll get different results on different displays. Those settings I used were on a basic 4k tv with all settings at default, picture mode on normal. Someone may load up that shader with their tv picture settings on “cool” mode and get a whole different vision. So what would you tweak to make it look better? I refuse to mess with my tv settings or backlights because that will become tiresome after a while going back and forth changing settings when I finish gaming. I’m just trying to keep things simple while making an all purpose shader that looks just good enough and passable, doesnt have to be 100 percent authentic looking to a T. But I’m curious as to how you would tweak my shader presets. Mind you I only like using masks 5 and 6, don’t care for the others or trying to make a pvm/bvm look.
Oh I definitely think that the mask should be as dark as possible while maintaining an adequately bright image, and you’re right that trying to make the image brighter through the shader compromises the image quality. The ideal is for the mask to be at 100% strength, but most displays will struggle to maintain adequate brightness at this level and so the mask strength has to come down a bit. I don’t know how those settings look on your display but I’m viewing them on a fairly bright Samsung LED TV with the backlight maxed out and brightness seems a bit lacking (IMO!).
For 480i content, have you considered using the interlacing simulation from crt-geom? Might be brighter and would also be more accurate, and that way you wouldn’t need the curvature or horizontal lines.
1 Like
Really tough to say what should be tweaked without seeing it in person, particularly since I’m doing weird stuff with this display and you’re using a preset picture mode.
Colors seem oversaturated and gamma seems off (too dark), but as you said you’re using these settings on a preset picture mode on your TV so it probably (definitely) looks vastly different in person. I’d just fire up Fudoh’s 240p test suite to make sure everything looks good on your display.
That mask would certainly benefit from a higher resolution and is too coarse at 1080p- I’m curious, why aren’t you using a 4k resolution? Slotmask really wants 4k and up. If you’re not a fan of aperture grille displays then you can get a very decent dotmask effect at 1080p with the magenta-green checkerboard pattern (see above).
edit: Also, have you thought about making two picture modes that you can easily flip between? On my TV I have one mode calibrated exclusively for using Retroarch with the backlight maxed out and a custom color space. It’s very easy to just switch picture modes using the remote when I’m not using RA. CRT phosphor emulation really benefits from increased brightness, so it’s something worth considering.
The thing is that the mask is not even at 100% in those pics. Both the mask and scanlines are close to 80% mark. Since the ReShade CRT shader is basically CRT-Geom with some changes, these are the values I use 0.8 for the mask and 0.2 for the scanlines. If I set those values to 0.7 and 0.3 respectively the image is more brighter at 50% brightness than the pics above at 100% brightness. But this causes the mask and scanlines to be too light/faint for my liking. So, even though its darker I’m happy with it.
About interlacing. Yes I tried CRT-Geom and I was happy with the look of it. But interlacing was causing burn-in on my LCD panel and I had to use the built-in tool in my monitor every time to fix it.
1 Like
Some more PCSX2 pics (These will be the last ones, I promise!)
Although it doesn’t look as good as I would like in 2D sprite based games. I think it looks better than static scanlines on interlaced games which cause line doubling on horizontal axis.
My settings (540p horizontal res) :
240p horizontal res :
(Oh, how I wish I could get this much curvature in my settings without moire ruining it!)
(Bonus) Tactics Ogre on PPSSPP :
P.S. Hope I don’t get banned for this!
2 Likes
You may try decreasing the scanline and mask strength some, it will decrease the moire some. From my experience the scanline strength had more to do with the moire then the mask does.
As I discussed earlier in this thread with @Nesguy I’m not a fan of light scanlines. With how thin the scanlines are in my preset they are hard to see if I increase scalines weight anything past (0.2).
Have you checked out the interlacing options in guest-dr-venom? There are three different interlacing modes and you can set the trigger resolution to whatever you want (default is 400 lines). You might have better luck with those.
240p stuff and older content generally benefits from a bit of blur, IMO. A one size-fits-all shader is tough to pull off. You might consider making a couple different presets for different types/eras of content. It’s really easy to flip between shaders in-game by using “m” and “n” on the keyboard. I understand the appeal of having one all-purpose shader, though, especially if you plan on running RA in kiosk mode.
2 Likes
I think it actually only has 2 interlacing modes, as mode 0 is (standard) scanlines, mode 1 is standard interlacing with the jitter/flicker, mode 2 is is no flicker interlacing, and mode 3 is a no-scanline (no interlacing) mode.
3 Likes
The SFIII 3rd Strike pics in my post are from PS2 version of the game running on PCSX2, not the arcade version running in RetroArch. The first pic is with the ReShade settings I use with PCSX2 and Dolphin, the second pic is just there to show the line doubling caused by static scanlines on interlaced games.
(I apologize for any confusion those pics may have caused.)
As for when I play 224p/240p games in RetroArch I use CRT-Royale-Kurozumi. And for PS1/Dreamcast games I have already been using Guest-Dr-Venom with interlacing mode set at 2 (smoothing) for the past few days and I like it a lot. I wish CRT-Geom had interlace smoothing or TATE from Guest-Dr-Venom, so I could port them to my ReShade CRT shader.
3 Likes