I’ll try and sharpen it up a little, though I’m not sure if I want it much sharper then this.
I’m going to try and take some shots of the bloom setup I’ve been messing with.
I’m also wanting to fiddle with some other settings.
There’s some things going on in this setup that need motion to show off, so I may look into recording some gameplay. (Just depends on if I can figure it out and how bad the video quality ends up.)
Here’s a handy test screen from Fudoh’s 240p Test Suite for adjusting sharpness. The black circle should appear solid black at normal distance.
Horizontal sharpness 6.00, substractive sharpness 0.50. IMO this is about as sharp as a consumer grade Trinitron that’s calibrated.
Horizontal sharpness 3.00, substractive sharpness 0.00. Too blurry. The sides of the circle don’t look solid anymore.
I’m not trying to simulate a Trinitron really, I’m just doing whatever looks good to me honestly. (I’m trying to not get crazy with things though. Hence the adjustment of settings from feedback.)
No worries, I wasn’t suggesting that’s what you should be going for. It’s just a handy tool. You want black outlines to be black though, right?
I want to preface this with this isn’t meant to come off as defensive, I’m just try to share my personal knowledge and opinion, on the matter.
From my understanding from when I used to do pixel art, most of the time were not really using black outlines to have “black outlines”, we’re using them to create contrast in the image and make the thing with an outline stand out more against the background. (That’s why in a lot of higher end “bit?” pixel art, they use the “darkest” shades of the other colors as outlines, because they had the color count to do this. This usually creates a smoother transition into the background while still standing out enough to not affect readability.)
This may also vary artist to artist so grain of salt, lol.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s one right answer to this as different artists employed different techniques. Probably something that should be adjusted per-game. I know I like a heavier blur when playing PSX stuff because those low res textures are rough. I actually usually prefer sharper settings for older content since too much blur causes some small details to be lost.
It’s basically just guest-dr-venom with deconvergence and color adjustments, soo… 🤷.
Maybe your talking about the settings, lol.
I also had a crappy TV with just composite inputs growing up, 20” screen, and it was a lot sharper than these examples. By the 1980s most TVs had good analogue comb filters, afaik.
But he already said he’s not going for accuracy per se, just what looks good to him… 
Just to clarify some things.
I grew up playing my systems (NES, SNES, Genesis) by running composite to my vcr, then from the vcr running RF/coaxial (so wasn’t really running in composite) into one of those big “wood” floor model CRT’s. (So early 80’s, late 70’s model I’d assume.)
I didn’t get to use actual full-blown composite until the N64 and PS1. When I had my own 17-19" POS CRT with composite input.
My screenshots are going to be worse looking going forward as I’m going to start experimenting with video signal shaders (composite, s-video) and most likely hack together a VHS shader.
Figured out the rough shape of my chain for ntsc and VHS inclusion. It’s going to take me two passes for the VHS, mainly because chroma smear is getting it’s own pass and the other VHS effects are going in a separate pass. (So I’ll have to work on the VHS effects pass mainly, lol.)
The ntsc side is where it gets more complicated, I want something I can switch between signals without switching shaders (composite, s-video, RGB=Pass-through). Ntsc-adaptive almost does this, it’s just missing the pass-through. Haven’t tried all of the ntsc shaders yet, though almost.
If you’re okay with passthru (i.e., no effect at all), just make a pass that sits after ntsc-adaptive and have it either sample their output or the one before them (or Original/OrigTexture or whatever) based on a parameter.
Could I do that with the second ntsc-adaptive pass? (I’m trying to keep my pass count down some.)
Sure. You could bring in that ‘quality’ parameter and if it’s set to 0 or 3 or whatever, just put a big ‘if’ conditional that just samples the Original or whatever or otherwise does the pass as normal.
That’s what I was wanting to do, guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.
Hey sheng, the message i sent you was about the shaders in this post. Sorry about the mixup. Your gorgeous .glslp shaders.
Wow, that’s a blast from the past! To be fair I have moved on from these shader presets as I changed my TV and found them a tad on the dark side.
They were not working because RetroArch moved directories for some of the dependent .glsl shaders in the chain, I have now updated the 3 presets in my original post (same links) so they should be working - put them in the root folder ‘shaders’, as I said I no longer use these but if they float your boat then carry on sailing 
Hi @shenglong! I quite liked the snapshots from your previous presets :). I was curious, what do you use now?
Hey @HyperspaceMadness, as many of us know, it’s a never ending story with shader tweaking! You think you’re happy and ready to settle with the perfect preset and you then think, “hmmmm, what if i try this”… and then it’s a constant loop, I just wished I played the damn games more than all the tweaking!
I am currently trialing out a combo of easymode-halation and guest-venom, still WIP though 
How’re you combining the two? This sounds interesting, lol.
