Welcome to the new crt guest advanced hd presets thread. Here I’ve taken @guest.r’s amazing crt advanced hd shader combined with @Dogway’s color grading shader and created Shadow Mask, Slot Mask and Aperture Grille crt shader presets for you all to enjoy.
“A mix of basic crt attributes that invokes a nostalgic vibe with a modern twist” is how I’d describe my crt presets.
Prerequisites:
Please make sure your output dynamic range is set to full and not limited. With full you’ll get richer looking colors and deeper looking blacks when using my presets. If your “black” screens look prominently gray try going into the shader parameters and either turning this setting I have highlighted down or off, it can be found near the bottom:
Installation Guide:
-
Change your RetroArch driver to “vulkan” in Settings/Drivers/Video if you haven’t already, if by chance you get a black screen while using my shaders then try using the “glcore” driver instead. Exit RetroArch and then reopen it to make sure your new driver settings stick.
-
Make sure your slang shaders are up to date by going to Online Updater/Update Slang Shaders.
-
Download the shader pack below and extract it (In some cases you will also have to download guest.r’s latest shader pack as well as sometimes new features get added that I may take advantage of that are not yet available upstream by just updating your slang shaders within RetroArch. I’ll always include a link to get it under my shader pack download if needed to do so).
-
Move the “sonkun” folder over to your “shaders_slang” folder so that it looks like this:
And that’s it. You can now load up the shaders just like you would any other.
Installation Guide for Android users that can’t reach the root RetroArch folder where the “shaders” folder is should follow this guide here.
Download link: https://www.mediafire.com/file/sl541wlgcgxn2gk/new-sonkun-crt-guest-advanced-hd-presets-01-27-2025-v2.zip/file
Read notes about my latest pack release here.
For this update you will also need guest.r’s latest shader update for my presets to display properly, you can grab it here.
Installation Guide for guest.r updated shaders:
-
Download and extract the pack.
-
Go to wherever you have your RetroArch shaders folder and then go to shaders_slang/crt then delete the 5 guest advance shaders in that folder which are “crt-guest-advanced-fast.slangp”, “crt-guest-advanced-fastest.slangp”, “crt-guest-advanced-hd.slangp”, “crt-guest-advanced-ntsc.slangp” and “crt-guest-advanced.slangp” and replace them with the 5 from the downloaded pack.
-
From the same crt folder go inside the “shaders” folder at the top and then look for a “guest” folder, delete that then replace it with the one from the downloaded pack that’s also in the “shaders” folder and that’s it, you’re done. You’ve now successfully updated guest.r shaders.
Features:
3 shader preset folders for 3 monitor types: 1080p, 1440p and 4k so whichever monitor you have, you can choose the right shader resolution for your monitor type.
Disclaimer - These presets were made and put together on a standard 65 inch 4K LCD display designed to be used on the three resolution types I’ve mentioned above, I have not tested these on a OLED, 720p or other random resolution type displays. If you use use my presets on any type of display besides those 3 screen resolutions mentioned I may not be able to help if you run into any display issues
If you do use my presets on a OLED display the first thing you should change is the Mask Layout setting in the Shader Parameters settings and try changing that to 1.00 (see sample image below)
That should help with lining the phosphors up properly on your OLED and make the overall picture look better. If you feel the image looks better with that disabled then leave it off.
45 shader presets to choose from per folder with 3 different phosphor types for USA, Japan and Pal that come in
Normal:
Warm:
and Cool:
white point temperature types.
Multiple cable types to choose from
Included are shader presets representing 5 cable types to choose from: RF, composite, composite with artifacts/rainbows, s-video and RGB.
2 composite types to choose from
Standard:
“Rainbow Artifacts” composite signal that has some fringing and rainbow artifacts depending on the game:
Resolution Switching Noise
Included is an amazing shader by @kokoko3k called “crt-resswitch-glitch-koko”. It produces a forgotten crt feature where when switching resolutions the screen would give a quick “flick” on the screen and produce a specific screen noise.
Example:
It’s better viewed in action. You can also read more on the topic here.
S-Video presets includes @Hyllian’s “sgenpt-mix multpass” shader to take care of checkerboard dithering and lite vertical line dithering. Here’s an example from Sega Saturn’s version of Mega Man X4:
No sgenpt-mix multpass:
Sgenpt-mix multpass turned on:
Sgenpt-mix multpass is still a work in progress shader so some games may produce weird graphic glitches depending on the game.
My recommended case use with these shaders is RF/composite for all systems from the 4th generation consoles and below (nes, snes, genesis, atari, turbografx etc.), composite (or optional s-video) for 5th and 6th generation consoles (ps1, saturn, n64, dreamcast, ps2, gamecube) and RGB for arcade.
Also for NES cores I recommend changing the palette setting. The two most popular cores are mesen and nestopia. For Mesen you should use the “Original Hardware (by FirebrandX)” setting, for Nestopia use the “NTSC hardware FBx” setting as my composite presets were designed with those pallets settings. Also with Mesen you should change both the top and bottom overscan settings to 8px to avoid harsh moire patterns on the screen.
For Nintendo 64 mupen core with Parallel-rdp settings enabled I also recommend changing the “crop overscan” setting to 8 to help reduce moire patterns that appear on the screen with that setting at default 0. For Sega Saturn if using the Beetle Saturn core change “Horizontal Overscan Mask” to 8 and “Last Scanline” to 229. For PlayStation if using the Swanstation core change Crop Mode to “Only Overscan Area” in the “Display Settings”, in the Beetle PSX core change “Core Aspect Ratio” to “Force 4:3”, “Initial Scan Line - NTSC” to 8 and “Last Scan Line - NTSC” to 231.
RF sample pics:
Composite sample pics:
S-Video sample pics:
RGB sample pics:
Choose your preferred screen type
Choose from having a flat screen:
or curved screen:
Both curved and flat presets are designed to fit right inside overlays from The Bezel Project.
The user @thingsiplay wrote an amazing article on my preset pack that goes more into detail with comparison pics and a video. You can read the article here.
Also YouTuber Retro Crisis has made a couple videos showcasing my presets with a installation guide along with showcasing the dithering and transparency effects from the composite and svideo presets, you can check them out here:
I have a YouTube channel as well, not much there but you can check out some of my personal favorite video game osts/bgms there if you want.
I’ve also made a “fast” preset of my Slot Mask preset using the “crt-consumer.glsl” shader. You can check that out here. It’s for 1080p I’m not sure how it looks on other resolutions.
I hope you all enjoy.
