I can hardly remember that conversation but to put it all to rest we probably need someone to do a thorough test of Blargg NTSC Filters with different PSX Cores and games.
I have heard that whether the Blargg filter preset works with PSX games depends on the colour format.
I have heard it depends on the PSX Core, (I know this is true in general though as BSNES doesn’t support the external Blargg Filter Presets up until the last time I tested but I think SNES9x does).
I used to use Beetle PSX (SW) and I couldn’t see any difference in the games I tested but in the @RetroCrisis video of my CRT-Royale preset pack which features my Custom Blargg Video Filter Presets, he showed perfect dedithering in Silent Hill when using the Video Filter Presets.
This shocked even me! When I asked him in the comments what core he was using, he said he always uses Beetle PSX (HW).
So maybe testing can be done with both 16 bit and 32 bit colour and stuff like that.
In general what I had been able to achieve using Blargg Video Filters seemed better in some ways than what I had seen using other NTSC Shaders around that time. Many of these shortcomings have been greatly improved since then, though some seem to still remain.
The main problem with the Blargg Video Filter Presets is that up to now we only have access to the SNES version for tweaking and creating external Filter Presets. Blargg made specific versions for different systems. That’s why they added “pseudo” to the preset names when they were added to RetroArch. For example the Genesis Video Filter Presets doesn’t use the Genesis specific version of Blargg, it uses the SNES filter like all the others. Most likely more accurate results in terms of mimicking the different console’s output behavior could be achieved if we had access to the other variants of Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets as configurable video filters. Tweaking is also not very user friendly.
Hey @DariusG, you’ve been digging around inside Blargg Video Filters, would it be difficult to port some others, at least the Genesis one to Video Filter Format with preset support as has been done with the SNES Video Filter?
…and also PCE and I think NES too but I can’t remember the results of my testing off hand.
In this case it’s up to user preference but why can’t video filter presets be used for this usage scenario, they can help with whichever effect is disabled by koko-aio? Kokoaio might also provide a more convincing Rainbow effect as Blargg SNES video filters won’t do that, at least I wasn’t able to using them.
I find imgur to be a bit cumbersome to get a full quality image. With imgbb this is trivial.
If you like those, you should see the new filter presets in my CyberLab Custom Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets Pack.
One thing I noticed, particularly with my CRT-Royale Turbo Duo Smooth Shader Preset is that if I combine it with a Blargg Video Filter Preset, it breaks the SuperXBR Smoothing. That was my first time prepending shaders and trying to build my own shader chain so there could be a different way of doing things which might have yielded better results but I even tried integrating the NTSC Adaptive Shader with CRT-Royale and Super-XBR and failed miserably, so you probably have that to thank for my continued work and refinement of those video filter presets.
So do spread the word, they’re right there and available to use and they provide a really high quality experience. There are also some nice gamma tweaks in there too courtesy Blargg and it definitely takes the edge off some of the untreated shader presets.
