Thanks for the tip, I followed your advice as always 
Is this gamma ok? I can see the speaker cones…
1 Like
No problem man!
Well, I guess that is good if you can make out the dark details but I really can’t say much except it looks good on my phone screen.
You might have to test other games as well, for example some brighter games like Joe & Mac, Street Fighter II’ Turbo Hyper Fighting, Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart and Super Mario All-Stars to see if they look too dark and/or compare with the ultimate reference, your CRTs.
Why not follow up with a similar comparison shot comparing your old settings to the new ones?
You can also use 240p Test Suite to assist.
It’s a lot easier to pick between 2 screenshots with different gamma settings and say which one I liked better than to just judge one in its own.
It does look good though and I like the way the green glows at the number of players select screen. Not seeing anything off with the colours either.
1 Like
I tried to make gamma the closer I can. This is my CRT.
And this the Shaders…
Also on my thread I posted some more Images…
2 Likes
Oh! Great work man! For the next step you can try nudging the White point in the shader towards the cooler side (higher colour temperature value) as the real CRT’s tiles look more blue, while the shader pic’s tiles has a bit more red in them making them purple…
The CRT shots also look slightly desaturated but adjusting the White Point to a cooler colour temperature should take care of that as well without you having to lower the saturation.
I’m judging based on the photos which could be influenced by camera settings and other environmental factors. If what I’ve noticed isn’t reflected when viewing in person then leave it alone but I have strong feeling that the photos are telling the truth.
Another parameter which affects things like overall tinting, colour temperature and white point is the “Phosphors” shader parameter by the way.
1 Like
Thanks, I think I have colour default, maybe I should raise it a bit, also whitepoint is set at -0.65. about the purple thing I don’t know what you mean. I’ll check it later, while I’m going out right now.
I think is the camera that makes things desaturated, it shows more vivid colours in real life. It’s hard to me to make a good photo, I try, but I think My mobile device isn’t that good My CRT is Pal, maybe colours are different, also I think the snes Image is on RGB also I’m using Snes9x emu, I’m not sure how accurate is this emulator, I know that emulators if there are not that accurate, colours tend to be weaker is BSnes Better? Also I’m not an expert, but I can notice that with amiga, using cycle exact and changing it to less accurate, the image looks weaker.
1 Like
I think you are right, I’m quite a noob in this stuff, but is it possible that amd radeon software interfieres with the temp colour? It was set in 6500k by default, but if I leave it on auto colours tend to be more saturated. And I’m a bit confused, that’s why also affects my shader style. I know is emulated, and the video comes out from VGA to Scart.
Didn’t you also have access to real hardware like a Mega Drive or something? I was recently noticing some sort of green bias on my CRT monitor and now I"m wondering if the hardware makes a difference, so I"m probably going to test it myself.
I was also already using a shader on it to up saturation and mess with the gamma. Probably not an issue with old low color PC games, but e.g. emulated SNES games for example don’t look that appealing to me when compared to my TVs.
1 Like
I have an original Pal Mega Drive, I will test it with Sonic the hedgehog, and see how it goes. On Snes Emu, on my PC with CRT Emudrivers, 240p Test Suite, The blue tend to be more purple, That’s why I’m confused…
3 Likes
And this is on the original pal Mega Drive hardware through Scart RGB.
2 Likes
Put my old Surface laptop (13,5" 1504p - for this content it works similar to 1440p) next to my CRT monitor to do some rough matching. From CRT viewing distance, looks pretty similar.
VGA doublescan is not for available for Guest fastest, I switched to fast instead. It’s a bit lacking, I don’t know if it’s possible to do more realistic matching with more scanline adjustments, or if it comes down to the mask, which of course lacks the necessary pixels.
An alternative for fastest is to disable scanlines and attach a slightly modified res-independent scanline shader with simulated height set to 350 (even divider for integer scaling size of 1400). Doesn’t look too bad.
5 Likes
10 Likes
This is the kind of thing one craved as a kid. I collected a whole bunch of magazines from that era, have to go over them again sometime. 
1 Like
Exactly! I wanted to play with those shots right on the magazine, they looked somehow much better than the real thing to me.
I think I’ve half of a closet full of those.
…every now and then i pick a random one and leaf through it 
PS:
I’m playing to add a “screen uniformity” function, but the real intent is to give the shader that unven brightness look as seen on the shots on the paper back then ^-^
Looks great! Could you please give the preset name?
1 Like
Simply amazingly beautiful. Is this part of your pack?
1 Like
Hey thanks, I didn’t expected it to be so popular… it was just a joke and the preset has been tweaked from game to game to look better with that particular content, but since there’s interest, I’ll try to make a generic one from the draft I should still have somewhere on my Hdd…
1 Like
It reminds me a lot of the image I remember from the C64, and the Amiga connected to a CRT TV. It’s quite hard to find such a shader preset. If someone makes presets for the C64, or Amiga, they are presets based on CRT monitors, not TV.
I’m currently using a slightly modified koko_aio pal_my_old preset with NTSC artifact enabled. Although it’s hard to find any information whether the C64 on a CRT TV displayed NTSC artifact, because most of the videos on YT are Commodores connected to CRT monitors.
Don’t you remember we talked about it? AMIGA was mainly used on PAL TVs, but C64 had a strong market in US too, so the quest for artifacts would restrict to the 8bit machine, imho.
wikipedia:
For a substantial period (1983–1986), the C64 had between 30% and 40% share of the US market and two million units sold per year,[9] outselling IBM PC compatibles, the Apple II, and Atari 8-bit computers.
Yes, that’s why when writing about ntsc artifact I had only C64 in mind.
1 Like
Remember those magazines would have employed half -tone dot effects which would do some blending of its own to the image similar to the effect the CRT Mask and Scanlines have on the image but in a different way.
Secondly, most likely the photos might have been taken slightly defocused to avoid moire e.t.c and that would have reduced the visibility of the Scanlines and softened the image slightly creating a smooth, anti-aliased look.
I wouldn’t say they looked better than the real thing. I appreciated the sharper, focused, saturated appearance of the Commodore 1702 in person. I could still see the screen door like effect being produced by the mask, scanlines and graphics while playing Ys Book I & II on the Turbo Duo!
It made the graphics look much better and that’s what I’ve been trying to recreate ever since I started doing this.
I love your preset for what it is though. I would love to see a tuned, sharpened version which looks closer to the actual C64 output on the 1702 monitor. I think you’re pretty close already!
1 Like