Shader to blend pixels horizontally on a 31Khz CRT monitor?

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

Title says it all. I have a Samsung CRT that I run at 2560x240@120Hz from my modern laptop. I use a random cheap HDMI2VGA transcoder I found on the internet (chose the cheapest one to make sure it wouldn’t scale the image)

I’m looking for something that ONLY blends pixels horizontally so stuff like meshes in Saturn games looks transparent (also sonic waterfall, dracula’s eyes etc). However I’m not interested in stuff like Mdapt and Gdapt that searches for dithered meshes and blurs them. I mean actual composite-esque blur over the whole image so that pixel art looks right!

I grew up with PAL-M (basically NTSC with color encoding that isn’t terrible, different from PAL and PAL-N) so no NTSC shader looks good to me (I hate the dot crawl, desaturation, random dancing pixels), so I don’t want that. I also don’t want to have to keep switching shaders every time a game uses 224 or 320, I’d like to set something up as the global preset and be done with it.

Sorry for making such a complicated request. But thanks in advance for the help if anyone knows what I should use!

#2

tvout-tweaks exists for this purpose, precisely

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#4

Everything I read about tvout-tweaks seemed to indicate that it was for improving composite out on hardware that had poor composite quality like the Raspberry Pi before the 5

But I will look into it again

EDIT: Clearly I was wrong! Looks great, thanks!

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#5

You can also try CyberLab Custom Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets.

There are some included in the RetroArch Settings–»Video–»Video Filters menu and you can get the rest here:

  • CyberLab Custom Blargg NTSC Video Filter Presets

You can also use the Blargg NTSC Video Filters built into many Cores’ Options menu.

#6

decoupled-guest-advanced-ntsc or decoupled-guest-advanced-pal are also options for this purpose, and definitely handle resolution changes automatically, which i’m not sure tvout-tweaks does?

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#7

This is just empirical observation which might be incorrect, but I’m pretty sure I’m onto what’s actually happening.

tvout-tweaks doesn’t really do anything about resolution changes. But that’s a good thing! All I had to do was open a saturn game and configure the shader so that it blends the dithered meshes there and it looked correct across all resolutions.

320 games look really blended and 224 games just look softer overall which is the intended look so I’m a fan.