Something I noticed about Royale is that the vertical deconvergence is done different from other shaders. It scales in sync with source pixels. See this small sprite scaled some 80x inside Retroarch and using vertical deconvergence from Royale:
OTOH, horizontal deconvergence and mask is independent of pixel scale factor. You have to adjust deconvergence and masks to fit your chosen scale factor.
yeah, this is your 1080p preset but without any decon (it was +0.35 on the Y only on red), the un-eveness is much less pronounced.
If you zoom in and look carefully you might see that some of the phosphors and scanlines are narrower than others. Perhaps stepping up the Integer Scale by 1 might eliminate or reduce this.
I don’t see why you can’t have both at the same time?
Plus it’s mostly the less “accurate” presets which look better in screenshots in my opinion.
I guess the results of bloom application can get close to what royale does, but i needed to add a line of code. The catch lies that bloom is merged on brighter colors only, on dark and mid colors the masks aren’t mitigated or very mildly.
I recently removed 2 parameters from the crt-guest-advanced shaders, maybe i can add another one. 
Hey, you got my bait! 
The pure RGB mask is that mask10 in your shaders, correct? It was the one that looked like royale’s.
What I think is the catch on royale’s is some increase in overall luminance without loosing contrast and keeping colors coherent. It’s not perfect because white contours are a bit washed out. But overall, it extracts a great luminance from my miserable LCD even using masks and scanlines and without HDR help.
Your pictures usually are geometrically perfect. I appreciate to look at them. The contours are great, masks can be seen if zoomed, etc. The only thing that needs improvement is brightness and contrast. That’s what royale delivers and are great to play from some distance from the screen. Compare the luminance of your screens with those I posted yesterday and you will see the difference in clarity.
Yeah, sometimes you got to know some tricks. Magic glow, gamma are a major game changers. Sometimes it’s unclear how to trick the shader into something…got to work on the documentation some more.
Your shader is a laboratory playground. You can tweak every pixel aspect. Some times I just break something and get lost where I went wrong!
Thanks, I appreciate that.
I currently use an OLED TV and I sometimes play in bright light and sometimes in the dark.
I also view them sometimes on my phone which also has an OLED screen. In my viewing conditions, the brightness and contrast seem fine enough usually.
I also deliberately started off using some darker gamma settings for my latest presets and have gradually worked my way up with the brightness in an attempt to normalize brightness among the different mask types because with all else being equal, I noticed that Shadow Mask was brighter than Aperture Grille and Aperture Grille was brighter than Slot Mask.
The reason seems obvious though, each one has more of the black grille drawn than the other.
I don’t use any actual CRT for reference and what I’ve noticed is that I quickly get accustomed to the brightness (and contrast) of a particular preset.
If I switch to a preset from a different era or from a set that has different “mastering levels” I can notice the differences right away, similar to the differences between raw signal and signal after preset is applied or another example is the difference between a preset with 100% Mask Strength and 60 or 70% Mask Strength or GSL Scanlines at -1 or 0 vs 2.
What I’ve noticed is that when viewed on a typical bright IPS LED display the extra brightness is very welcome.
Another thing about viewing any of my screenshots is that you have to view them either at native resolution or zoomed in to get the correct brightness. They will tend to look darker the more they are scaled down.
So at the end of it all there are tradeoffs, even the lower TVL’s I tend to favour leave more dark space in between and with these things every lit pixel counts.
I also use very minimal Glow and Halation in order to preserve the Mask and keep things sharp and there’s only so far one can go with Post CRT Brightness, Bright Boost and Gamma Correct before things start to look washed out, burnt or clipped.
I even use custom scanline settings for many of my presets. Of course the defaults might be brighter but then my settings might make things look a bit sharper or provide a bit more contrast.
So I’m just a guy playing around with settings hoping to eliminate or minimize things that I might find distracting or that might detract from the experience.
Mostly things like blur when viewing from afar and stuff like that and also fuzzy looking edges or grainy looking shadow mask phosphors.
So for another user using my presets it’s very easy to get things brighter by simply lowering the Mask Strength, decreasing the GSL Scanline Type or raising the Gamma C slightly.
They can even increase Bloom.
Are you sure it’s your shader that needs to get closer to CRT Royale or the other way around?
I find your Bloom Implementation to be amazing in its current form.
Take some of my recent low/less than perfect contrast and brightness presets and turn up the Bloom on them and magically they will get brighter and more vibrant at the same time.
With my recent presets I’ve been focusing even more on preserving the Mask Gamma over the whites so that’s why I’ve limited my use of it and anything else that dilutes the mask but I’ve used it extensively before.
For me, when tweaking if things look washed out, I just add a little Saturation to taste.
I understand that. Personal taste about how much clarity some screen should have is just that, personal. What I was pointing was that even using the same display (mine in case, or yours), one can objectively see if one picture has more luminance than other, and that’s the case when I compared my pictures with those of yours.
I’ll answer that even if it wasn’t my quote.
I don’t think @guest.r meant that. Both shaders are great on their own and very different in features. Guest’s are much more full of features allowing unimaginable visuals, while Royale’s has some cool unique way to present aperture grill masks with clarity even on cheap LCDs. I don’t agree that it means a demerit from him to pursue improvements.
I’ll stop here, because it’s too much off-topic discussion. Let the pictures come back.
I understood this and I agreed with this actually. Just tried to explain that even though this may be true, one can quickly adapt to different preset looks.
I’m not against Guest’s or any other shader “learning” from other shaders and improving as a result. Just being cautious about changes to the existing Bloom implementation in order to do so due because if it’s done as a change in the current Bloom implementation I might have to retweak a lot of presets which use the current implementation but that’s how it is sometimes.
This is a release candidate 16-bit console settings on 4k for the Mega Drive and Neo Geo. Stay tuned!!!
Some more tweaks: crt-royale-1080p-v5
I compared some screenshots taken from a real Sony Wega Trinitron and then tweaked some params to achieve a very similar visual. Other than that, I gave up on vertical deconvergence.
Some comparisons (off-screen from Sony, that’s why gamma is wrong):
Consumer Sony Trinitron:
crt-royale-1080p:
Consumer Sony Trinitron:
crt-royale-1080p:
Unfortunately Retroarch crashes if I try to take a shot using some overscan (an old bug), so I can’t take a bigger screenshot.
I’ve found it doesn’t crash if you use the glcore driver as opposed to Vulkan.
I just added 4K Snes settings on my thread if any one wants to try it 
Oh, someone told me that some years ago and I just forgot. Thanks!
Hi @Hyllian, your work is very valuable and thank you for sharing it, I hope and wish that your preset will be released regularly together with the retroarch base shaders, that it will be included together with the other stock ones.
