You do get a lot more detail and dimension with masks in 4k and my little 1650 laptop gpu seems to handle it ok. Does anyone get weird intermittent bugs with Vulkan and screenshots? Some days it plays nice others not.
1 Like
Haven’t even uploaded this preset yet and I’m already finding ways to improve it 
I think this is getting pretty close to the maximum dynamic range possible without introducing clipping (I know I’ve said that before but I’m running out of tricks). I’ll have time to do some additional fine-tuning/tests tomorrow. This is probably going overboard with the bright pixel boost.
2 Likes
Sorry I haven’t finished that up yet, ended up being busy today. Haven’t had a chance to finish up the work I needed to do on it and finish testing.
1 Like
lol no worries. Thanks for the help.
1 Like
Not a big deal tbh. Just have to get the free time/motivation to do things lol.
1 Like
I did stop being lazy enough yesterday to make new switches for my arcade buttons and do a basic cleaning of @Nesguy’s presets.
Need to finish up some things on the presets, and install my new switchs tomorrow.
Just a couple test screens, trying to dial in dark pixel bright boost. I think maybe there’s such a thing as too much dynamic range. While all the detail is still technically visible in the second shot, you really have to strain to see it, and our modern displays are easily washed out by any number of factors: ambient light, glossy screens (better for CRT emulation), viewing angles, and backlight bleed (and these settings are intended to be used with maxed-out backlights). I think this really depends on the quality of the display and the viewing conditions. On a better display and/or in a dark room, you might be able to lower dark pixel bright boost a bit lower than 0.50 while still being able to easily see all the detail in dark content.
1 Like
It’s taken me a bit but I have the dosbox_core up and running with general midi and a bunch of sound fonts to play with. I grew up with a mac and was always jealous of X-Wing and Tie-Fighter so I’m looking forward to playing through them and see what I missed.
5 Likes
Lottes is decent but it’s an older shader and there are better options now IMO. Personally, glow hurts my eyes with prolonged use and it also washes out the image. Biggest reason why I don’t use Lottes is that it lacks subtractive sharpening. Basically, either the entire image is too sharp or high-contrast edges are too blurry. CRTs were able to keep high-contrast edges quite sharp, at least when using a high-quality signal.
Guest-dr-venom, custom settings. (I swear I’m going to get these uploaded either today or tomorrow)
Lottes with curvature removed.
Lottes looks too blurry, and you can tell the fake mask (enormous pixels). I would choose guest.r shader over it any day. Crt-geom is better too, and crt-easymode. But one could just choose guest.r as you can imitate both crt-geom and easymode with it.
1 Like
Ok, before I go and screw anything up, I just want to make sure I have this procedure down.
-
Fork the thing that I want to make changes to (do I have to do all of shaders/slang/?)
-
Add files
-
Click pull request, compare the fork that I made changes to to the master
-
profit…?
Yes, fork the entire repo, make your changes either in the web interface or via command line (don’t worry about number of commits; I’ll just squash it down to one anyway), create a pull request comparing your fork to the main repo.
I’ll merge it in whenever I see it come up.
2 Likes
Ok, I think I did it 
Do I need to click “merge pull request”?
Ah, I see: it was making a PR to your own repo from a branch. Weird.
Anyway, I was able to make the PR to the main repo from your branch and then merged it, as well. So, congrats, you’re in https://github.com/libretro/slang-shaders/commit/e38e31d142ffdedfadb78212729201622e91f6e9
2 Likes
lol glad you were able to figure it out. Thanks!
2 Likes
I discovered you can switch out the masks in the Mame_hlsl and decided to try torture myself and see what I could do with a shadow mask. (I had to make my own as the one provided caused artifacts.) Here is a comparison of my work in progress with default venom, mask set to 3. Last one is Dreamcast so you can see how it works with higher res games. I scaled the images down and it looks like it cause some uneven scanlines that aren’t present in 4k.
Okay so it’s in there now, but I can’t get it to load. Should I replace “shaders_slang” in the filepath with “…” ?
This is what it currently looks like:
shader0 = “shaders_slang/misc/grade.slang”
Should it be this instead?
shader0 = “…/misc/grade.slang”
I have some notes at the top before all the shader code but that shouldn’t be a problem, right?
EDIT: Okay yeah that’s what needed to happen. Works fine after making that change, I’ll do another pull request and hopefully won’t screw that up this time
1 Like