Please show off what crt shaders can do!

[Nesguy]

That looks like the scanlines you get on a 20” BVM or a 31kHz monitor with the interlacing shader. I’m into it, but it’s even more of a brightness killer than my xVM preset.

Would you mind posting some 240p Test Suite shots? Curious to see what the dynamic range is like with your preset. I think I’ve made the lines as thick as possible in my xVM preset while maintaining good DR but maybe there’s something I’m missing.

I think guest-dr-venom has better sharpness controls than Royale, it’s the main reason why I prefer it. Royale always seems either too sharp or too blurry and can have ringing artifacts depending on the settings and content. Maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough.

[Nesguy]

Yeah, looks nice. I feel like that mask is almost cheating, though.

I also think the scanlines should taper a bit more, but not sure if that shader can achieve that without looking too blurry overall. I’m also not seeing much in the way of beam width variation.

[Mickevincent]

The image is from a video so thats not exactly how it looks. I can do the test bench image later after work.

[DariusG]

Have to say it’s really hard to emulate an analog signal to a digital display, most of the times looks like an overlay on top of the image. Mostly failing on mask emulation, it just isn’t convincing on 1080p. I have tried tons of settings on easymode-halation but still the mask looks like some overlay that just adds artifacts to the material. Scanlines are almost there but still lacking. Imo the most convincing is crt-geom with it’s subtle mask or guest.r with mask 0 or 7 and some tweaking. Imo mask should be left out in 1080p monitors, and go for that PVM look, it’s more close to what 1080p monitors can do.

[BendBombBoom]

Here are two more playing around with the masks on mame_hlsl. I still get great contrast and dynamic range. Could someone smarter than me take a look at the shader? Their is a bloom pass in the folder that is unused and I am unable to figure out how to get it working.

[Nesguy]

Not bad! SotN looks nice

Scanlines are a bit non-uniform in the Demon’s Crest shot, though.

[DariusG]

The first one, Symphony looks convincing. The previous one with outrun no because of the fake mask (probably too bright original material exposing the fake mask).

[Nesguy]

You’re not going to get fully convincing mask emulation without a retina resolution display. We also need a lot more brightness than what current displays are capable of delivering in order to get the emulated phosphors to display accurate RGB intensity values. At the right viewing distance though, with the right settings, you can almost fool yourself that you’re looking at a CRT with 1080p. It’s a fool’s errand, but it’s fun to try nonetheless. I’ve tried all the masks and the only masks I would consider using at this resolution are the Lottes stretched dot mask, guest-dr-venom slotmask, and cgwg aperture grille (mask 0 in guest-dr-venom). The rest do bad things to the image, as you’ve observed.

[DariusG]

Guest.r mask 7 looks surprisingly close to my Trinitron too (need to up a little bit from default 0.30). From a point of view guest.r shader adds fidelity that isn’t there on my regular Trinitron CRT if you are careful what you do and don’t fool around with shadow mask emulation.

[Nesguy]

Well yeah, you wouldn’t want to add shadow mask emulation if attempting to emulate an aperture grille

Mask 7 can have a weird effect on the image, though, as it does some kind of brightness compensation. Just something to be aware of. It’s not always noticeable and depends on the content.

And yes, guest-dr-venom is great. The best, IMO, but I haven’t played around with Mame HLSL very much. I’ve got a couple presets in the works right now for guest-dr-venom, should be uploaded tomorrow, hopefully. Would be nice to get some constructive feedback.

[Nesguy]

I would also give the cgwg aperture grille a try as it takes into account the LCD subpixels and will look better when running a game in fullscreen mode. That mask you’re using really only looks good in screen captures, IMO.

[DariusG]

I was playing hlsl when using standalone mame, it can look great but needed separate settings for every game depending on vert. resolution (scanline scale or something).

[DevilSingh]

The colors look different cause I use the GBA-Color shader with your preset.

Can’t wait to try out xVM! When will it be added to RA?

[Syh]

I imagine sometime this week, I’ll be sending Nesguy the cleaned preset sometime after I wake back up. Need to run a few more tests on my end before I hand it back off to him.

[extreme_tiger]

Looks amazing! Especially the glow.

I created this account pretty much just to beg you to share your settings for this one.

[Mickevincent]

Here are some images. Like I said, the last image looked different cause it was from a video. These are print screens from in game. For me they wont look correct unless I right click and open in new window.

[Nesguy]

Thanks! From gray ramp, I can tell that you’re getting some clipping and some crushed blacks, so the dynamic range could be improved. There’s going to be some lost detail in very dark or very bright content with these settings. Can you also post color bars? It looks like high-contrast edges are nice and sharp while still softening the pixel edges, although some additional examples would make it easier to judge this. Try posting something with sprites that have black borders around them (SMB 3 works). Sharpness test looks good, though. The higher scale you’re using might also make a difference, here; I’ve only played around with Royale at 1080p.

[Syh]

Seems like the general consensus is that royale looks best at 4k, really anything higher than 1080p tbh.

[Mickevincent]

I am not really into making it that perfect. I also play on a projector (3200 lumen, 1080p) so my brightnes and contrast is probably very different than yours. I think about buying a pvm or bvm but I am not sure it is worth it for just older games. I have not seen one irl in 20 years so I dont know of the difference is that big… is it? Maybe it is. The screen size will absolutely be different tough

[Nesguy]

Yeah that’s a pretty unique setup. You’re still going to get lost detail with those settings (crushed blacks, clipping). The clipping is probably easier to live with but you’re going to be missing a lot with darker games. On the plus side, the scanlines look very nice if you’re into the BVM look.