@aorin1 - Nice comparison shots, Quick question if I may? The original/older version of crt-guest-dr-venom.glslp definitely had the Saturation parameter, however the latest release seems to no longer include this (or I’m going blind), are you adding another colour adjustment shader to the chain to control saturation?
@lfan - I found I had to replace the afterglow.glsl, avg-lum0.glsl and avg-lum.glsl with stock for it to play nice with the N64 cores. I also add a first pass with stock.glsl and force the resolution to 240 on the y axis for scanlines to look proper.
@hunterk, @guest.r, Dr .Venom, Hyllian, EasyMode, @torridgristle (forum won’t let me tag more users!), all those shader coding geeks which my futile brain can’t remember the names of - I wish I had your skills! ALL contributers/devs involved, we the community, thank you for your efforts, it’s nice to have all these choices.
I changed the color saturation parameter inspired by the Cadillacs screenshots you guys were comparing here, but I wonder why some colors become more inclined to purple instead of blue, the CRT photo looks more blueish while the emulation is purple. What would be the correct approach to solve this? In my post above, you can also see the Sonic 1 for Genesis also becomes a little more purple when I tone down the saturation a bit.
PS: The same adjustment doesn’t make Super Mario World blues purple, so maybe people with real hardware and TVs could confirm if they’re looking as they should?
@hunterk I downloaded the crt-guest-dr-venom-ntsc-composite.slangp preset and tried loading it but it made no difference whatsoever, like no shader was loaded at all.
In the first post there is a link to zip file with a host of PNG’s, from this I extract the “CTX D-Group - 32px.png” and replace the “other1.png” in the crt/guest/lut folder with this png. Now load up a game, select the crt-guest-dr-venom shader and set the “LUT Colors” parameter to 3. It’s a subtle change but I feel for me anyway, the blues looks better - more natural blue. Try it, might work or might not, it’s best to do a screen capture of both to compare for yourself.
You will have to re-build the CRT shader chain but for the first pass (shader 0) add a stock pass then set the scale type to absolute and scale y to 240.
I normally re-build the shader chain within the Retroarch GUI by adding each pass as per the desired shader preset, but start off with stock.glsl or sharp-bilinear-simple.glsl as the first pass, once all the passes have been added save the preset. Now open the preset in a text editor add/edit the shader 0 type and y0 values as per below:
All this does is downscale the video output resolution to 240 pixels forced height. I find this works better for CRT shaders and scanlines which look better with 240p, 224p etc… content. This method works especially well for the PSX core, PSX games had different resolutions within a game, making scanlines look inconsistent, this fixes that for me.
the NTSC composite passes are using original files, so adding an option to remove flickering is very unlikely, but you can modify the preset and change:
frame_count_mod0 = 1
Imo it doesn’t look that nice though.
Shader doesn’t have the 256px and 320px option, because preset values can’t be accessed by shader menu. So i used a hybrid approach, where 256x content behaves like 256px, 320x like 320px etc. It’s a very good compromise i think.
It also contains an interesting bit about white balance:
White balance:
In theory 6500K is the standard white point for TV, and decent/newer sets can be adjusted to this (it’d even be somewhat accurate). In practice, older CRT TV color temperatures are all over the place: it was found that an electric blue tint had more of a sensory impact on consumers, so manufacturers used to race each other to the higher end of the scale (not unlike the music industry’s Loudness War). So again, it’s up to experimentation.
My TV appeared too blueish even with the camera’s highest WB preset of 7000K, and I had to manually add a white balance shift factor of A4 (towards amber/away from blue) + G3 (towards green/away from magenta). Adobe Camera Raw interprets this as a WB of 8200K with a tint value of -8; not sure how correct those values are, but the result looks correct indeed.
