After seeing you guys putting so much effort in these shaders, for the first time I tried adjusting a shader and I’m using the latest crt-guest-dr-venom, the only adjustment I changed is the saturation from 1.00 down to 0.65, they are looking good, but unfortunately I don’t have any CRT TV around to match them together, making the emulation more accurately displayed in a LCD HDTV.
The raw output is much more vivid, but with a lower saturation it looks more accurate if I remember the 90’s correctly.
I’m using vulkan with the slang shaders, the gl results are the same, I have tried it with FB Alpha before switching to Vulkan.
The dulling of the colors that you’re remembering may be related to the way it was connected to your TV. Have you tried the crt-guest-dr-venom-ntsc preset that’s in the ‘presets’ directory?
The full version of the shader (NTSC version included) is a bit sensitive to original resolution used. I managed to get it working with Dolphin at 1x internal resolution, while 4x crashed RA. You could replace the avg-lum pass with stock shader to try anything higher than 640x480 for example.
@aorin1 - Nice comparison shots, Quick question if I may? The original/older version of crt-guest-dr-venom.glslp definitely had the Saturation parameter, however the latest release seems to no longer include this (or I’m going blind), are you adding another colour adjustment shader to the chain to control saturation?
@lfan - I found I had to replace the afterglow.glsl, avg-lum0.glsl and avg-lum.glsl with stock for it to play nice with the N64 cores. I also add a first pass with stock.glsl and force the resolution to 240 on the y axis for scanlines to look proper.
@hunterk, @guest.r, Dr .Venom, Hyllian, EasyMode, @torridgristle (forum won’t let me tag more users!), all those shader coding geeks which my futile brain can’t remember the names of - I wish I had your skills! ALL contributers/devs involved, we the community, thank you for your efforts, it’s nice to have all these choices.
I changed the color saturation parameter inspired by the Cadillacs screenshots you guys were comparing here, but I wonder why some colors become more inclined to purple instead of blue, the CRT photo looks more blueish while the emulation is purple. What would be the correct approach to solve this? In my post above, you can also see the Sonic 1 for Genesis also becomes a little more purple when I tone down the saturation a bit.
PS: The same adjustment doesn’t make Super Mario World blues purple, so maybe people with real hardware and TVs could confirm if they’re looking as they should?
@hunterk I downloaded the crt-guest-dr-venom-ntsc-composite.slangp preset and tried loading it but it made no difference whatsoever, like no shader was loaded at all.
In the first post there is a link to zip file with a host of PNG’s, from this I extract the “CTX D-Group - 32px.png” and replace the “other1.png” in the crt/guest/lut folder with this png. Now load up a game, select the crt-guest-dr-venom shader and set the “LUT Colors” parameter to 3. It’s a subtle change but I feel for me anyway, the blues looks better - more natural blue. Try it, might work or might not, it’s best to do a screen capture of both to compare for yourself.
You will have to re-build the CRT shader chain but for the first pass (shader 0) add a stock pass then set the scale type to absolute and scale y to 240.
I normally re-build the shader chain within the Retroarch GUI by adding each pass as per the desired shader preset, but start off with stock.glsl or sharp-bilinear-simple.glsl as the first pass, once all the passes have been added save the preset. Now open the preset in a text editor add/edit the shader 0 type and y0 values as per below:
All this does is downscale the video output resolution to 240 pixels forced height. I find this works better for CRT shaders and scanlines which look better with 240p, 224p etc… content. This method works especially well for the PSX core, PSX games had different resolutions within a game, making scanlines look inconsistent, this fixes that for me.
