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.
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?
Simply amazingly beautiful. Is this part of your pack?
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…
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.
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!
Man, this Sparkster pic, is it real game?
No. It’s just a mock-up made by a pixel artist.
When you wanna feel like a superhero playing your favourite videogames:
This just made me laugh loudly
Hey there,
I’m having a lot of fun playing DK64 again, with the “tag everywhere” ROM patch. I’m pleased by the look of xBRZ upscaled textures, smoothed and then having a CRT shader to regain some grain, thanks again for those great tools!
So Glide64 is running X4 internal resolution with 4xBRZ, Smooth 3 filtering, and then CRT-Guest-Advanced (with NTSC resolution scaling set to 0.4, some color correction, High resolution scanline and Internal Resolution Y = 1). The game is also one of the few in N64 with anamorphic 16:9 IIRC, and I cropped 7 or so pixels around each borders.
Hey there,
I was talking with the fine folks on the AbandonwareFR forum about Sierra’s old point and clicks in EGA, and finally started to play the Colonel’s Bequest (1989). This one went completely under the radar for so long for me, so blinded by the sirens of the Larry games… I totally missed Laura.
I wanted to try to prepend some dedithering and some scaler this time before CRT-Guest. So Jinc2 and ScaleFX. Also some color correction to get the skin tone less pink/red. The result is not accurate for an EGA CRT in any way (and we only got an old ugly CGA back then anyway), but I still like it. Preset for 1080p if you want to try it : https://mega.nz/file/LI4ACTwR#1_ioA2LuqbcpCInQapPh1bTP5aF84KXQbA2BMA2OWD8
this is an image of an actual ega monitor running the game
I tried the game on Scummvm at an actual 640x200 and 640x350 resolution on VGA monitor. Aside from brightness, result is rather close
Thanks for the pics! I went from CGA to SVGA and never owned an EGA or VGA monitor.
I think JINC2 could be replaced by “JINC2 sharper” for a dedithering effect that would keep more black checkerboards. But overall I think I got the grey levels close to what the EGA is showing. Grey pixels are IMO too white in the raw image, in the floor tiles on the pics those grey pixels are brightening the tiles. The blend is darker in the shader and the EGA pic. I also think the skin tones are less orange/pink and look a bit more natural.
Here’s a faster version of the shader preset running with CRT-Guest-fast. I’m still tweaking the aspect ratio, maybe it’s a bit too wide here but I think it’s close. https://mega.nz/file/CQZ2RSwL#g6YM8GeM_5_PYE4TXHc2WBs932o2qDXTRlcZU61yOYA
And raw and wet pictures for the comparison.
I’m running it on DOSBox-Pure but you may also be interested in the HD patch made by PlayerNone running on ScummVMX : https://playernone.blogspot.com/2021/02/colonels-bequest-high-resolution-mod.html
thanks. For Retroarch I am using your shader for EGA games. Unfortunately Scummvm standalone is not compatible with Retroarch shaders, so for EGA best option is mdapt that does the proper dithering without the dots. I’ll use mdapt on the VGA monitor too.
Hey there!
JINC2 + ScaleFX + CRT-Guest-Fast, but with NewPixie for the rolling scanlines… I should put a video instead but sadly Youtube’s compression is butchering Newpixie and CRT-Mattias. Those shaders are awesome tho, thank you so much for them… Here’s the preset : https://mega.nz/file/PEJiWLIC#rWEO57C8kuVRxYo_ZCBZgDZcDanpYoMjaHwaOy5Z0SY