Prominence of the scanlines is determined by the TVL count/pitch and beam focus, signal type has little to do with it. Some people like the PVM/BVM look and others like a lower TVL count.
Scanlines on a consumer Trinitron:
Also this:
With higher line counts the scanlines become very prominent. Also note that the difference in scanlines between the two rightmost shots is almost negligible.
Edit: I agree that there’s too much blur in a lot of the shots I see posted here.
These are really close shots and some are HD monitors, not CRT TVs. My Trinitron has very subtle scanlines, something like 3/8 on dark areas and 1/8 on bright. But no any jaggies, pixels are round. Scanlines are barely visible on bright areas.
PS image is razor sharp, Nintendo Wii RGB md/snes/nes emulators feeding the Trinitron
Has it been calibrated, washed and re-capped? An aging, uncalibrated CRT is going to look vastly different. What size is it? Small screens have lower TVL counts.
Quite a few of us have owned several CRTs over the years. Some people prefer higher line count CRT monitors and they’re quite capable of producing very prominent scanlines.
It’s 14". No any Shader right now can look better than the Trinitron imo. But i dig some shaders, could live with them
It’s no wonder why the scanlines are barely visible on that screen. It’s probably around 250 TVL at most. I’ve seen 9” PVMs that had NO scanlines.
Also, the beam focus isn’t any better on a 14” Trinitron vs a 27” Trinitron so that’s also going to reduce the prominence of the scanlines.
If you look carefully that Ghouls n ghosts screenshot you see the scanline ratio is as i said, 3/8 on dark and 1/8 on bright. Same profile on my TV, but because it’s relatively small they aren’t so bold as seen in most shader screenshots. Plus some don’t take in to account that bright pixels will make the dark scanlines thinner.
PS they also look more bold on cold colors (e.g blue) than warm colors (e.g. yellow, red) on a real Trinitron. I bought the TV from a very skilled TV technician that also did a heavy repair on my Amiga 500 so i am sure it’s working flawlesly
I suggest you take a look at the shots posted in this thread. Scanlines can vary widely in appearance based on the dot pitch/TVL and beam focus. There’s no such thing as a consistent scanline ratio seen in all CRTs. It ranges from NO scanlines on the low end (~250 TVL, 9” screen) to almost 1:1 scanlines on the high end (1000 line BVM).
Here’s a 27" Trinitron. The black gaps between the darkest lines are around 3x the width of the visible lines.
The gamma seemingly being too high I think is caused by the “Bright Boost Dark Pixels” parameter.
Even at the lowest setting of 0.5 it looks like it is still artificially brightboosting dark colors. This means that things like a dark brown become either a lighter brown or even lighter reddish. I’ve edited the parameter in the shader such that values below 0.5 are possible and then you see that with a setting of 0.1 to 0.3 details in some games start to pop up that I had never seen before (like grades in color that previously seemed one color). A very low setting on this parameter enhances depth on objects in circumstances where dark/light gradients are used to create illusion of depth on sprites/objects. Bright Boost Dark Pixels high default value seems to destroy a lot of these details.My guess is the same will be true for your example, worth experimenting if you ask me.
Be prepared for more loss of brightness though when using the setting at 0.2 or 0.3… Maybe the quest for brightness is making the shader authors go a bit (a lot?) over the top with the default brightboost settings. I think it would be helpful if some more explanation came on what value a “NO brightboost” actually represent for the Dark Pixels (Bright pixels seem ok). It definitely is not 1.0 and I even don’t think it’s 0.5, but lower than that…
You’re right, the dynamic range is significantly improved by lowering dark pixel bright boost! We can also raise bright pixel bright boost pretty high without any adverse effect for even greater dynamic range. Of course, we should max the backlight when doing this.
We should lower dark pixel bright boost as much as possible without losing any detail, and raise bright pixel bright boost as much as possible while avoiding clipping. I’m pretty amazed at the difference this makes; a lot of small details are revealed that are otherwise missing, just as you said.
Very nice findings, thanks for sharing!
EDIT: I really need to look into this some more. I think 1.00/1.00 for dark/bright pixel bright boost may in fact be correct. Which means that there’s something else going on with color/gamma if you’re getting crushed blacks/lost detail.
Any idea why I keep getting a message saying that the file size is too big (max size 4096kb) when uploading an image, when the file size is less than that?
No clue. What’s the real file size?
Less than 2,000kb, can’t remember the exact size. I’ll check when I’m back at my computer.
What should dark pixel bright boost be set to to avoid any artificial brightening of the colors? See previous post by myself and rafan’s recent post for context.
I’d imagine 0, as it’s something that was adding most likely to compensate for loss of brightness. (So any added would technically be artificial, but I didn’t write the code so 🤷)
I feel like the better question would be how high can you have it before it starts noticeably artificially brightening colors.
Concept: Temporally Emulate a CRT Electron Gun Too, Not Just Spatially
Long-term, I’d like to see some emulators start to consider temporally emulating an electron gun. This will eliminte motion blur similar to a CRT.
The sheer brute-force of refresh cycles (240Hz, 360Hz) can be used to create a granular CRT electron gun emulation. Basically a software-based rolling-scan BFI with alphablended overlaps. Four segments for 240Hz, or six segments for 360Hz.
Also, I posted a suggestion about a future “software-based rolling scan” for 240Hz and 360Hz monitors at the GroovyMAME forum – aka Temporal HLSL where you use the brute refresh rate to emulate a CRT electron gun at sub-refresh levels, but I should probably create a new forum thread for it. I also posted a issue at the MAME GitHub too as well.
Upcoming high refresh rate HDR displays are good for 60Hz emulation because of:
However, I think this should become a new RetroArch issue being open too, as a long-term incubation.
Theoretically, it is easier to implement than beamraced VSYNC, since we only need to worry about the display at the full refresh cycle level (plain ordinary old-fashioned VSYNC). The refresh rate race to retina refresh rates are producing a boom of high-Hz monitor.
We’re looking forward to the upcoming IPS 1ms-GtG DELL 360Hz monitor (AW2521H without the F suffix), which will allow high-quality 6-segment rolling bar emulation of a CRT electron gun. There’s also a IPS 1ms-GtG 1440p 240Hz 600-nit DisplayHDR panel coming in 2021.
The same proposed “retro_set_raster_poll” still needs to be added to RetroArch, to benefit this initiative too (not just beamraced VSYNC). Since that’s a univeral API for futureproofed beamracing techniques including this alternative “beam racing via brute Hz” approach.
I think a setting of 0 might break it as it’s used in other equations (from my cursory examination of the code), but I’ll have some more time this evening to do some tests.
Yeah, I’m not sure. I haven’t really looked over that section of the code.
I’ll try and look over it later and fiddle with it some.
Ok, so it’s totally possible to set dark pixel bright boost to 0.00.
I’m not sure this is correct, though - it definitely results in crushed blacks/lost detail. I think 1.00 may in fact be the correct setting.
EDIT: I’m getting good results with dark pixel bright boost at 0.50 and bright pixel bright boost at 1.50. I have no idea how “correct” this is, but the dynamic range is good, with no clipping or crushed blacks.
@Syh are you having any issues with uploading screenshots?
@Nesguy @Syh I’m also finding that for the stock guest-venom shader the dark pixel bright boost at 0.50 seems about the “no artificial brightboost” level, or at least where it can’t be seen. Definitely increases the dynamic range in a good way if your monitor is bright enough and has a proper gamma curve (not too dark in the lower end).
I noticed when using the grade shader included preset with for example the PAL preset (gamma 2.8) there it seems the dark pixels bright boost may be lowered even below 0.5.
I’ll take some screenies later and see if I have any issues uploading.
