Problems with hq2x

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

I am having an issue with the hq2x.cg shader on Windows. I initially set retroarch and emulation station up on my main desktop which is an Intel i3/AMD Radeon machine running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Everything worked great… controllers, hot keys, shaders, etc. I had each emulator loading hq2x.cg at startup with the ability to scroll through all the available shaders in-game via hotkeys. Worked perfectly.

After getting comfortable with retroarch/emulationstation I decided to get it all configured on my HTPC which is an Intel Atom 330 with Nvidia Ion graphics running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Everything is working great with the exception of hq2x.cg. If I tell an emulator (I have tried fceumm_libretro and snes9x_libretro) to load hq2x by default, retroarch crashes at startup. If I don’t load a default shader and then manually select hq2x in-game via the hotkeys, I just get a black screen. The emulator doesn’t crash and I am still able to keep scrolling through the rest of the available shaders, but obviously hq2x isn’t working.

I have tried both 32bit/64bit Windows and 32bit/64bit retroarch and cores with the same result, so my guess is it has something to do with the hardware. I really like this shader and would love to get it running. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

#2

The hqx shaders require loading a shader preset (cgp) rather than an individual cg file. On my end (AMD graphics), I’m not getting a black screen, but the shader isn’t working properly, either. I’ll look into it.

#3

Awesome, thanks. I was unaware of the .cgp files. What’s weird is it works perfectly on my first machine by loading the .cg directly with:

video_shader = “:\shaders\hqx\hq2x.cg”

Or like I said it also works scrolling through the shaders in-game via the next/prev shader hotkeys on my controller. Searching the shaders directory for .cgp I see that quite a few of the shaders do have the preset file, but hq2x does not. Is this something I need to manually build? Is there a log file somewhere I can check to get more information? The Windows application log only shows a generic “retroarch.exe has stopped working”.

#4

Hmm. You may be using a very old set of shaders, which had 2xScaleHQ misnamed as Hq2x. This is actually something that affected every shader version of “hq2x” (more info here, if you care to read the background). If that’s the case, you should go download the updated repo from https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders (use the button in the right-hand sidebar that says something like ‘download the repo as a zip’).

You can still use that 2xScaleHQ shader from its proper scalehq folder, but there is also an hqx folder that contains the tru Hq2x cgps, though they’re not working properly for me right now.

You may also be interested in the ‘scalex’ shaders, which Sp00kyFox just did some work on, and/or Hyllian’s xBR shaders, which probably won’t be fast enough on your ION board, but are similar-but-superior-to Hq2x in most use-cases.

#5

I am using the shader that comes with the latest version of RetroArch (1.0.0.2), whatever version of the shader that is. And like I said, I don’t see a .cgp file for it anywhere in the \shaders folder or subfolders, unless it has a different name. Here is what the shaders directory looks like straight out of the RetroArch zip:

395×899

And here are the contents of the shaders\hqx folder:

I will give the one from the repo a try tonight, as well as check out the scalex shader. Thanks.

#6

1.0.0.2 is ancient, update to the latest 1.0.0.3 beta or one of the nightly builds on the buildbot : http://buildbot.libretro.com/

The “hq2x” in that folder is actually known as 2xScaleHQ now, it was incorrectly named before and confused with hq2x. The actual hq2x has been ported to a Cg shader since then and has a different layout and looks different.

Current version is here:

https://github.com/libretro/common-shad … master/hqx

You can download the whole common-shaders repo as a zip if you need to.

https://github.com/libretro/common-shad … master.zip