Hey there,
Having a blast this week playing MGS on Swanstation, with enhancements like 4x resolution for 3D, adaptive 2D smoothing, xBR textures and PGXP. I still kept dithering and didnt use the widescreen hack, but eventually set 1:1 DAR aspect ratio as I thought it was looking good like that here. And CRT-Guest-HD to postprocess it all. Thanks again for all those great tools!
I think I begin to understand why the guy calls himself Solid Snake. XD
Yeah upscaling makes those PS1 games look like some PC games or the era or some early PS2.
Yeah PGXP is magic. Thanks to that I’ve also managed to play a bit in stereo 3D with the vr headset using this mod on duckstation. I dont want to remove the dithering tho, I like it grainy and a bit nostalgic.
I hope we get something similar for Saturn in the future.
Amiga Gods on a typical RGB shader and crt-consumer-1w-ntsc-XL. Composite will blend all dithering on an A520 modulator (tested on real A500+). This is true PAL composite modulate/demodulate and apply common luma/chroma bandwidth, no any tricks to achieve the effect (like dithering check and merge shader).
Some extra shots
I guess this is just the limited bandwidth at play right?
Also, where there those “dotted color artifacts” from the A520 PAL modulator? I think I only used it via RF.
There are rolling (animated) dotted artifacts too, but i decided not to implement it (not to recreate every single system on this earth on one shader lol), just left it use pce320 7.14mhz clock on pal alternate lines.
Yes, more or less.
Using Mask 0. It looks really good.
Mask 6
This last update is amazing, I’m really happy with it 
Looks good but needs something for the high contrast edges- those black lines should be sharp and thick, not blurred.
This is composite video, the sharpness you see here is nothing special, you’ll see the same sharpness on any ratty early 90s set that isn’t broken:
That’s plain hardware bilinear horizontally and a blurrier than normal smoothstep (i intentionally tweaked it to be blurrier, default sharp one was giving me that artificial/fake vibe) vertically. Mostly a test/proof of concept to see what can be done without tricky horizontal filtering like lanczos etc. Gives a pretty convincing crt-like pixel shape.
Full power mask on medium to dark areas, compensate with some small glow/boost tricks. All injected to “crt-sines” slang shader.
Regarding bilinear, even if it’s just horizontal, how do you guys feel about it? I tend to run away from it as much as possible. Full amount bilnear filtering looks hideous to me now that I can play and apply crt filters in high resolutions. Destroys pixels and messes up brightness, taking away a lot of “crt feel” from the image. It used to be a cheap, easy way out back in the day when I was forced to do 720p, but nowadays I avoid it like the plague. There exist way, way better interpolation methods imo.
If video cards were used to do finance calculations, the bilinear filter would make more sense.
The bilinear filter is, in all honesty, best treated as a legacy function. It is so important because so much relied on it, but it doesn’t behave like light does in nature, and it doesn’t work as a good signal interpolator either. At least nearest neighbor allows you to reconstruct more natural signals by filtering, like carving a sculpture from marble. And point sampling is similar, just in the opposite way, where it’s a foundation to add things. Bilinear isn’t flexible that way.
Bilinear is really fast and is still a useful scaler for a size between 0.5 and 2.0 of the input because it can be so fast, but if you have performance, there will be a better choice.
Bilinear is not to be used “as is” on a shader as it gives hideous results. But at this particular case i twisted shapes by adding some glow/boost that will alter shape the way i wanted it to look. I can use whatever i want to, like lanczos, gaussian, quillez, smoothstep or whatever, i just want to try new things every now and then, just for the fun of it. All of them can look good with some tweaking etc.
And those Zelda shots look great 
My approach now (for 240p) is to make sure that the Y axis is supersharp (nearest neightbour sharp) and then interpolate/soften up horizontally to taste.
Here by the way is the Sony-est, most vivid look I have attained so far. Heavy lines and mask, lots of brightness, no discernible clipping or lost detail either in highlights or shadows. When it comes to this specific presentation, which is my favourite type of crt, I really don’t see how I could push things any further without some form of dynamic brightness control in place.
Yeah there is a limit how much you can do on these screens and it’s pretty good already. Most CRTs would never look this good anyway. Actually most shaders, even zfast do look much better than an average CRT.
It depends on what specific qualities you’re looking for, CRTs still beat LCD in motion clarity, and very often in contrast ratio, unless you’re talking about higher end displays. In general I agree, though. CRT shaders are so good now that I significantly downsized my CRT collection. The two I kept have just been gathering dust in my closet.
