Please show off what crt shaders can do!

[Nesguy]

This is more or less done, just hoping to get some feedback before I go ahead and upload.

First shot is with minimal bloom, rolling the highs / introducing some soft clipping at the high end. Basically, the gaps over the brightest colors are as dark as possible, but you sacrifice some dynamic range.

Second shot, the gaps over the brightest colors are a bit reduced but dynamic range is better. Personally, I think this still looks very BVM-like and is a nicer image, overall. Trying to keep the gaps over the very brightest shades 100% black loses too much dynamic range IMO, and BVMs are known for having insane contrast ratios.

Usual disclaimer applies; increase LCD backlight to 100% and view images at their original size.

less bloom, less DR:

more bloom, more DR:

edit: a few thoughts.

1. This gives me some ideas for further improving the DR in my currently existing shadow mask preset.

2. I’m tempted to remove the mask altogether, since the TVL of a BVM is pretty much on par with a 1080p LCD, and these settings are intended for 1080p. These settings may not look as intended with higher resolutions/scales, as per @DevilSingh’s GBA examples. The mask does help to reduce clipping at the very high end, though. So maybe it’s best left as-is…?

3. I had to expand the ranges for the beam shape parameters to 1.00 - 100.00 for this to work, so I don’t think a normal preset will work. I’ll have to either include instructions for increasing the beam shape parameter range (pretty easy stuff), or maybe @guest.r would be kind enough to change the ranges. What do you think, @guest.r?

4. I haven’t done much with grade, I just set all the color palette stuff to sRGB and color temp to 5505K. Any suggestions here would be welcome. Of course, all of this stuff can be tuned to preference and/or display conditions using the parameters.

[BendBombBoom]

I need my bad games to look as bad a I remember. I have a new favorite ugly CRT shader. It has scrolling scan lines, convergence, and few other artifacts to make it all nice and fuzzy. The first screenshot is no shader, than new_pixie, and finally my adjusted version of the mame_hlsl in the crt folder.

[Syh]

Somewhere between the Mame shot and the pixie shot would be pretty sweet tbh.

The shots look good though.

[DevilSingh]

Seems like your preset works perfectly with SNES games. And 6505K white point temp looks the best on my display.

Native 1080p Res :

5x integer scale :

After testing it with SNES games I thought maybe the GBA color palette was messing with the shader. But, even adding the GBA-Color shader (which simulates GBA’s LCD screen) doesn’t seem to help.

I’ll stick to my own preset for GBA games for the time I think.

P.S. - I prefer the 2nd BVM pic. Nice work!

[Jamirus]

You can save the GBA shader pass by using the inbuilt core color correction of MGBA , I found that the shader doesn’t seem to work right with certain combinations, maybe it also gives different results here.

[Nesguy]

Yeah, that’s very weird… Looks like something specific to your config, though. Even those Contra shots seem kinda off. I think there’s something going on besides what the shader is doing to the image.

Here’s mGBA w/ my shadow mask preset. Color temp is 5505K. I should probably revise my preset so that’s the default.

SNES9x 2010, same preset, 6505K

Before I go and upload these presets I need help coming up with a catchy name because I hate my username, lol. It’s just something dumb I hastily came up with years ago and I’ve been stuck with it ever since

[Nesguy]

I want to know what happens with a Game Boy Player connected to a CRT in real life. Does it pad the image to 240 lines?

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but is there a shader that will add padding/letterboxing to the image? If my hunch is correct, we need to add 40 pixels to the top and bottom of the image (just black lines) before scaling it to whatever. @hunterk you probably know the answer to this, lol.

[hunterk]

How about “maxDR” for your presets, since that’s the goal, right?

Re: Game Boy Player, yes, it line-doubles and pads to 480i, actually, which looks pretty crappy, so a lot of people run homebrew to output 240p instead. But yeah, that’s what the border is for, mainly.

As such, in the ‘border’ shader directory, there are some SGB and GBP presets, which will do the padding, add a border and then apply a CRT shader on top. You can apply your shader passes instead.

[DevilSingh]

I’ve no idea why this preset is behaving like that on my system. It can’t be my RA setup as I just updated it to the latest version (clean zip extraction, no overwrites).

I assume you are using the same SLANG version of the preset in your thread. Right?

[BendBombBoom]

What games do you think have the worst rainbow dither artifacts? So far my vote is for Eternal Champions. I can’t decide how bad I want my bad CRT to be:

[Nesguy]

I just updated the preset posted in that thread, can you try that and post the same screen from Minish Cap when you get a chance?

@hunterk 480i, ew. I’ll give the border thing a try, thanks!

Yes, I think “guest-dr-venom-MaxDR-xVM” and “guest-dr-venom-MaxDR-shadowmask” will suffice. I don’t know if I’ll have any luck getting @guest.r to edit the ranges for the beam shape parameters, though, which is essential to getting the xVM preset to work. Looks like he’s moved on to other things

[hunterk]

Changing parameter range isn’t a particularly big deal. I think I can make an executive decision here to push it through.

[Syh]

I mean people force the gameboy player thing into 480p on the GameCube.

[Nesguy]

The degree of rainbow artifacting depends on the quality of the NTSC decoder used in the CRT (notch/bandpass, 1-3 line analogue, 2-3 line digital). A decent TV from the 80s probably had an analogue filter which would reduce the appearance of rainbows with a stationary image. 3D comb filters were introduced in the late 90s to early 00s and can make composite video almost indistinguishable from S-video.

So, it all depends on what vintage of CRT you’re going for.

[Nesguy]

The range for beam shape high and beam shape low should be 1.00 - 100.00, increment should be 1.00. I don’t know if that’s going overboard but that’s what I did, lol. Thanks!

[hunterk]

how high/low does your preset actually go? Is there any point in going all the way to 100?

[Nesguy]

Beam shape high is at 100.00, beam shape low is at 1.00.

[hunterk]

Ah, ok, then yeah, that should be fine. However, I think the presets can force values outside of the normal min/max, too, so it’s not exactly necessary just for the purpose of getting your presets in.

[Nesguy]

Oh, that’s cool. I’ll test with unaltered guest-dr-venom just to make sure everything’s working right before submitting.

[Nesguy]

So basically there’s no way to get scanlines (using actual hardware) with GBA without using home brew or modding? Is this correct?