Please show off what crt shaders can do!

That mask isn’t looking right IMO, I suggest using either regular Lottes stretched dot mask or the guest-dr-venom slotmask pattern. I think the vertical lines in that mask make it look somewhat strange.

@hunterk

Ok I submitted a new pull request, maybe I did it right this time :sweat_smile:

@Nesguy I agree. the mame_hlsl shader has a scaneline Y offset that I put at the minimum value above 0. It gives the scanlines a 3D effect that is interesting. The negative is the masking can wonky. I’m hoping I can find a balance.

Yeah that’s a lot better IMO as far as the mask is concerned. Sharpness still seems high but it’s tough finding that sweet spot where the pixel edges are soft but high contrast edges stay sharp. I tried looking at mame_hlsl to see if it has some kind of reverse-blur sharpening but it was annoying to use. Too many settings and I couldn’t figure out how to get it to blur the right way (dark pixels at edges become brighter instead of light pixels becoming darker). I think this is the result of doing gamma correction before blurring.

It’s an odd shader for sure. It looks like some aspects aren’t working as their is a bloom pass in the folder that doesn’t work in slang but does in GLSL.

That’s because the updated slang version is based on MAME’s bgfx shader backend version, which doesn’t have bloom, while the GLSL version is still based on MAME’s HLSL shader backend version, which does have bloom but also has some other issues.

1920x480p 60hz and interlacing shader to 2x scale on my PC CRT.

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Very nice. I think this setup is the best image for the least hassle on 31khz CRTs.

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I’m not able to set a wider horizontal resolution and 240p vertical at 120hz, so this is the best I can get. I followed your tips on another topic. Thank you.

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Same settings like above but with Blargg composite filter. I chosen a heavy dithered game like Comix Zone.

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And now Game Boy with interlacing 3x scale. I think GB games doesn’t look bad with scanlines.

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adjusted the brightness and contrast as good as I could, with test images.

So I just learned that the sharpness setting on my TV wasn’t correct and it was having a pretty big impact on all my settings when using the cgwg aperture grille. Did a complete overhaul of guest-dr-venom-maxDR that should be a lot better now.

@hunterk submitted another pull request, maybe I’m doing it right now? lol.

heh, yeah, it looked good. I’ll try to merge it once I get my permissions restored.

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Could someone plase tell me why my crt shaders gets uneven with Parallel on certain N64 games like DK64 and Banjo Kazooie? It like Rare games are higher resolution but I still run them in 320x240. But with Mupen64 it looks like usual. Why is that?

I’m quite new to Retroarch but I definitely love to play with the shader settings.

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Playing around with the Analogue Shaders Pack and some ntsc and composite pass. I grew up in PAL region but i think this game definitely looks better in ntsc. The funny thing is that I just launched FF9 to test the shaders. 20hours later and i’m still playing it for my 3rd playthrough.

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So soft, much noice.

I think this is the absolute brightest I can get it while maxing out the scanlines and avoiding clipping and crushed blacks. There’s still a slight amount of scanline bloom/glow with the very brightest colors. If I set the beam shape high parameter to around 130.00 or 140.00 then the bloom/glow is completely eliminated, but this saps brightness from highlights and makes the image look flatter. It should still be possible to get an adequately bright image with a setting of 140.00 on a newer (brighter) LCD.

I set gamma in/out to 3.50 in guest-dr-venom to keep the gamma curve in grade. Setting guest-dr-venom’s gamma to the same value for in/out just lifts the entire curve without altering its shape. Higher than 3.50 resulted in crushed blacks.

Lowering dark pixel bright boost lower than 1.00 made it impossible to pass the PLUGE test. I wound up setting dark pixel bright boost and bright pixel bright boost to 1.30. To keep the shape of the gamma curve, bright pixel and dark pixel bright boost should be raised the same amount. Otherwise, you’re changing the gamma curve and possibly getting clipping/oversaturation somewhere in the middle, OR you’ll lower black level lower than it needs to be for sRGB, making dark details hard to distinguish. The highest I could set bright pixel bright boost without getting any clipping was 1.30. Higher than this and you start to get soft clipping and eye strain, and at 1.40 you get hard clipping.

EDIT: bright/dark pixel bright boost should be left at 1.00 when in a dark room, and no higher than 1.30 in a bright room; 1.30 in a dark room is too bright and will look washed out.

AFAIK there’s no way to make the image brighter than this without reducing the strength of the scanlines.

(Adjust LCD backlight to 100%, of course).

Top, beam shape high 100.00. Bottom, beam shape high 140.00:

edit: forgot to edit color temp; I think this can go up to maybe 7100K-7300K before you start clipping blues (assuming you’re using sRGB).

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Looks great! Who needs waifu2x!

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