Your pictures usually are geometrically perfect. I appreciate to look at them. The contours are great, masks can be seen if zoomed, etc. The only thing that needs improvement is brightness and contrast. That’s what royale delivers and are great to play from some distance from the screen. Compare the luminance of your screens with those I posted yesterday and you will see the difference in clarity.
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Yeah, sometimes you got to know some tricks. Magic glow, gamma are a major game changers. Sometimes it’s unclear how to trick the shader into something…got to work on the documentation some more. 
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Your shader is a laboratory playground. You can tweak every pixel aspect. Some times I just break something and get lost where I went wrong! 
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Thanks, I appreciate that.
I currently use an OLED TV and I sometimes play in bright light and sometimes in the dark.
I also view them sometimes on my phone which also has an OLED screen. In my viewing conditions, the brightness and contrast seem fine enough usually.
I also deliberately started off using some darker gamma settings for my latest presets and have gradually worked my way up with the brightness in an attempt to normalize brightness among the different mask types because with all else being equal, I noticed that Shadow Mask was brighter than Aperture Grille and Aperture Grille was brighter than Slot Mask.
The reason seems obvious though, each one has more of the black grille drawn than the other.
I don’t use any actual CRT for reference and what I’ve noticed is that I quickly get accustomed to the brightness (and contrast) of a particular preset.
If I switch to a preset from a different era or from a set that has different “mastering levels” I can notice the differences right away, similar to the differences between raw signal and signal after preset is applied or another example is the difference between a preset with 100% Mask Strength and 60 or 70% Mask Strength or GSL Scanlines at -1 or 0 vs 2.
What I’ve noticed is that when viewed on a typical bright IPS LED display the extra brightness is very welcome.
Another thing about viewing any of my screenshots is that you have to view them either at native resolution or zoomed in to get the correct brightness. They will tend to look darker the more they are scaled down.
So at the end of it all there are tradeoffs, even the lower TVL’s I tend to favour leave more dark space in between and with these things every lit pixel counts.
I also use very minimal Glow and Halation in order to preserve the Mask and keep things sharp and there’s only so far one can go with Post CRT Brightness, Bright Boost and Gamma Correct before things start to look washed out, burnt or clipped.
I even use custom scanline settings for many of my presets. Of course the defaults might be brighter but then my settings might make things look a bit sharper or provide a bit more contrast.
So I’m just a guy playing around with settings hoping to eliminate or minimize things that I might find distracting or that might detract from the experience.
Mostly things like blur when viewing from afar and stuff like that and also fuzzy looking edges or grainy looking shadow mask phosphors.
So for another user using my presets it’s very easy to get things brighter by simply lowering the Mask Strength, decreasing the GSL Scanline Type or raising the Gamma C slightly.
They can even increase Bloom.
Are you sure it’s your shader that needs to get closer to CRT Royale or the other way around?
I find your Bloom Implementation to be amazing in its current form.
Take some of my recent low/less than perfect contrast and brightness presets and turn up the Bloom on them and magically they will get brighter and more vibrant at the same time.
With my recent presets I’ve been focusing even more on preserving the Mask Gamma over the whites so that’s why I’ve limited my use of it and anything else that dilutes the mask but I’ve used it extensively before.
For me, when tweaking if things look washed out, I just add a little Saturation to taste.
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I understand that. Personal taste about how much clarity some screen should have is just that, personal. What I was pointing was that even using the same display (mine in case, or yours), one can objectively see if one picture has more luminance than other, and that’s the case when I compared my pictures with those of yours.
I’ll answer that even if it wasn’t my quote.
I don’t think @guest.r meant that. Both shaders are great on their own and very different in features. Guest’s are much more full of features allowing unimaginable visuals, while Royale’s has some cool unique way to present aperture grill masks with clarity even on cheap LCDs. I don’t agree that it means a demerit from him to pursue improvements.
I’ll stop here, because it’s too much off-topic discussion. Let the pictures come back.
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I understood this and I agreed with this actually. Just tried to explain that even though this may be true, one can quickly adapt to different preset looks.
I’m not against Guest’s or any other shader “learning” from other shaders and improving as a result. Just being cautious about changes to the existing Bloom implementation in order to do so due because if it’s done as a change in the current Bloom implementation I might have to retweak a lot of presets which use the current implementation but that’s how it is sometimes.
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This is a release candidate 16-bit console settings on 4k for the Mega Drive and Neo Geo. Stay tuned!!!
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Some more tweaks: crt-royale-1080p-v5
I compared some screenshots taken from a real Sony Wega Trinitron and then tweaked some params to achieve a very similar visual. Other than that, I gave up on vertical deconvergence.
Some comparisons (off-screen from Sony, that’s why gamma is wrong):
Consumer Sony Trinitron:
crt-royale-1080p:
Consumer Sony Trinitron:
crt-royale-1080p:
Unfortunately Retroarch crashes if I try to take a shot using some overscan (an old bug), so I can’t take a bigger screenshot.
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I’ve found it doesn’t crash if you use the glcore driver as opposed to Vulkan.
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I just added 4K Snes settings on my thread if any one wants to try it 
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Oh, someone told me that some years ago and I just forgot. Thanks!
Hi @Hyllian, your work is very valuable and thank you for sharing it, I hope and wish that your preset will be released regularly together with the retroarch base shaders, that it will be included together with the other stock ones.
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Hi @Baelong, what preset are you using for your screen ?
I think it might work in 4k if you change just one param on my presets:
“Mask - Triad Size Desired”, change it from 3.00 to 4.00 and it probably will work in 4k! I can only see part of the screen in 4k, though () so, I need someone with a full 4k display to say if it indeed works and get good visuals.
This is how I see it (cropped to 1080p):
If they achieve some worth status, that’s for sure. For now, they’re just presets slightly tweaked. I’m playing with the params to extract their potentials.
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Soon I will upload new Neo Geo Settings, this is a Release Candidate…
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CyberLab CRT-Royale anyone?
Tap on image then zoom in for best viewing. Desktop users, right click then Open in New Tab, then press F11 for FullScreen. Non 4K users, zoom in until it looks correct.
Does anyone know if CRT-Royale has LG OLED friendly mask layouts like CRT-Guest-Advanced or Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor?
If not, does anyone know if they can be added to it?
Also, what’s going on with the Take Screenshots function these days?
I can’t take screenshots using CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC standalone, Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor nor CRT-Royale. I’m using the Vulkan API.
Every time I try to take a screenshot the screen freezes and I get a soft lock. I can still hear the menu sound effects when I move the cursor.
I can take screenshots using GeForce Experience though.
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Nope. All masks are based on RGB displays. Never looked into the code seriously, though.
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Okay, thanks. Quick question. How do I Prepend or Append other shaders to this for example NTSC Adaptive or Super XBR or maybe both?
Everytime I try everything looks dark and very blurry and there are some vertical yellow strokes in the top left corner of the screen like a power bar.
The smooth preset I have included on v4 and v5 uses super-xbr prepended. From there to a 4k preset you just need to change that mask param I mentioned earlier.
As for ntsc, it’s a bit tricky. But, you can get some idea from the crt-royale-ntsc presets inside “presets” folder (it’s not my presets, though). There’s a composite and an s-video preset there.
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