Look, I find it difficult to express an opinion, you are probably right about the speech you made about the low invasiveness of the scaler, thus maintaining an aspect more faithful to the origins, albeit sharper. It’s probably the right way. And I also hope if this makes the ScaleFX preset a little lighter, since I noticed my PC stuttering when I use it with some PlayStation games, so much so that I had to format it and reinstall the video drivers hoping to solve the problem. This problem due to my hardware made me lose my enthusiasm and I hope to solve it, also because your shaders are fantastic. I don’t understand how a PC running Street Fighter IV at full graphics with AntiAliasing has a stutter running a PlayStation game at native resolution with RetroArch and your shaders with ScaleFX. Mystery. Anyway great work yours, can’t wait for the new update to come out.
I doubt tweaking that setting will make the overall shader lighter. It’s true that scalefx mixed with my presets use up resources on the gpu, it even slows my set up down. You may have to have a beefy gpu to even run the scalefx presets at full speed. I personally don’t use them as I like my games with their original pixels, I only added a scalefx version in cause you guys requested a smooth upscaled version. If it’s slowing your pc down then you may have to stick with the regular presets.
Yeah this update should be a good one to go with guest’s latest release. I managed to reduce the moire on the screen by a bit that’s one of the upcoming changes, these presets look more brighter as well.
Beyond the technical limits of my PC, thank you always for your work and your sharing. I hope in the future I can change PCs because I would like to use your work on all emulation.
I’ve already discarded those settings lol. It’s a habit, I’ll come up with some settings, be “finished”, let it sit for a few then go back to tweak it again. I wasn’t satisfied with the look plus I wanted it brighter, I came up with some newer settings this morning, I’ll save those for the release though coming soon.
First of all, thank you for your work. I had been looking for and modifying shaders for my 16Bit games for some time and it has been trying yours and being amazed.
Already with your configuration it looks very good but I always have the need to configure everything 
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I had to lower the intensity of the colour because on my monitor it seemed somewhat saturated. And I have also softened the CRT effect for personal taste.
It would be great if you could include a colour intensity setting since if you use parameters such as gamma and saturation some tones are distorted.
Thank you for these spectacular shaders 
Hello and welcome to the forum and my thread. I’m glad you chose to try out my presets, they’re constantly being updated with new things added in as I go along on this journey.
This shader was brought to us by the great @guest.r so I am not in any position to add in such settings, you can ask him though if you’d like. As far as colors as you have seen there’s many ways to tweak the saturation and colors within the settings if you look around. I believe I tweaked all “gamma” settings except for “input gamma” and “output gamma”, I never touch those but you can try tweaking any of the other gamma settings until you hit a sweet spot that you like.
You’re welcome, I’ve been currently working on increasing brightness, the presets in the current pack are too dim by my standards, I like my shaders bright colorful and vibrant enough to illuminate a room while playing in the dark plus I was still getting used to the new “magic glow” settings when I put that pack out. I’ve been putting that magic glow to work though and have been testing some new settings I may use in my next update:
Try them out here:
Place them in your shaders folder not shaders_slang.
These settings were tested using guest’s latest test update by the way, you can grab that here.
Edit: Working on new settings once again since guest’s latest update. Stay tuned.
New Version Release (03/02/2023)
Changes Made
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Uses guests latest version ( 2023-02-25-r1) shader update.
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Tweaked “magic glow” again, made presets a bit brighter than the last release.
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Using some of the new “slotmask interaction mitigation” setting (helps reduce moire).
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raised “scanline shape bright pixels” setting making scanlines appear more better in bright areas.
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Switched the static noise on RF presets with the “luma” type noise.
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Lowered the "scalefx threshold* setting to the lowest number on all scalefx presets, lowering that setting tries to revert pixels back to their original pixel look while still smoothing out the overall image.
As always you can grab this latest update in the first post.
Hopefully after this I can start working on Aperture Grille and Shadow Mask presets to add into the pack with the Slot Mask presets. Stay tuned.
Did a quick edit to my lateset pack, wanted to squeeze out a bit more brightness so I raised the “post brightness” setting a bit. Grab the new pack in the same spot above.
Prototype Aperture Grille and Shadow Mask rgb presets planned for upcoming update:
I’ve just thrown your newest Shader package with the scalefx presets to my current screenshot machinery. I am pleased with the results for the most part, but there is one thing that did not resolve as I hoped. First the part that excites me and then the part that does not.
The transparency is resolved very well here, but that comes with the svide/composite type in combination with ntsc filters. I like the overall look combined with it. Kinda upscaled, but still retro look. Works well here.
This is the spicy part here. The lines are not very smooth and scalefx seems not doing its job here. Look at the reference standard scalefx, it should look like this.
First off I wanna say I love when you do those comparison kind of pics, makes things so much easier to compare when they’re all grouped together like that.
That part is most likely from the switch up I made in the scalefx settings, I lowered the “Scalefx Threshold” setting from the default “50.00” down to the lowest number. I did that in an attempt to “unsmooth” things a bit to try and bring the pixels back to their original look.
Reason for that switch is I noticed on Zelda Link to the Past Link’s eye looked distorted with that threshold setting left on default. When I lowered it to about 13 or so his eye looked normal again. I then decided to just lower that number all the way down afterwards, if that was one game that had “distorted” graphics I can imagine countless other games it might be doing that to as well so I lowered that setting and made that lower number the new default setting to play things safe.
Try bringing that setting back up to 50 and see how the letters look, should look smooth again like the standard scalefx pic. It’s the very first setting at the top if you use the rgb preset.
I tried changing some settings. I hope this is a complete list of what has been changed, I’ve messed things up here so sorry for not being clear:
scalefx presets/1440p/01-crt-guest-advanced-slotmask-neutral-rf-ntsc-2-phase.slangp
- for shader0:
filter_linear0 = "false" - for shader1:
filter_linear1 = "false" - removed line:
< SFX_CLR = "0.010000"(I think resets to default 0.50)
The left bottom crop named “variation” is the same as the right bottom with the changed applied. At least it looks little bit smoother, if you look at the A and M. And Link looks fine in this image.
Yeah it looks smoother in the “variation” pic since you took out that “sfx_clr” setting which is the “scalefx threshold” setting I was talking about above. That top right pic with Link is what made me make the change. I know his eye right is suppose to look a little droopy by design as we can see in the “nearest” pic but something about the way it looks with scalefx default settings turned me off. That one image right there made me make the change.
I personally don’t use the scalefx presets I just put them there cause it was requested. It would take less than 5 minutes to put out a update pack with that scalefx setting back to default if that’s what you want though.
Notice the other little changes too, as without them the threshold effect doesn’t have big effect. This is because the images is heavily modified before it gets to scalefx. And compare the bottom two images on Link, the variation looks a bit more rainbow-ish and the numbers (zero in example) are more round.
But who knows what side effects this has. I am not experienced enough to make suggestions with confidence. Just wanted bring up this to discussion. Just happen to play with the settings for this shader. I am not the target audience for this preset anyway, because I like your “regular” set of shaders a lot and the standalone scalefx. So there is no need for rush from my perspective. 
Yeah I see the little differences when looking a bit closer, nice touches.
Ah ok no problem, I’ll just leave it the way it is then and if a few people come in saying they want the default scalefx look I’ll revert it back.
As far as I know, any of those consoles: NES, SNES, Genesis always came up with RF switch by default. Yet, I barely have found any preset that may have this representation through shaders. Noise alone approaches great to this bad video signal looking with interference but it’s still not explored well enough with the types of interference you can get on a TV. Even flat screens look old (and so then more accurate to that era looking) when it’s wired to RF Switch… I still do have a 30+ years old functional NES and the noise definetely brings up some old looking to flat screens if this cable is damaged to an extent.
Maybe if you can you can take a few photos of it in action? Could be nice to use as a reference if nothing else.
New Version Release (03/04/2023)
Changes Made
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Uses guests latest version ( 2023-02-25-r1) shader update.
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Welcoming to the pack are brand new Aperture Grille and Shadow Mask presets to go along with Slot Mask, now you can choose from the 3 common crt mask types to have fun with and do your retro gaming with!
Shadow Mask:
Aperture Grille:
- Added in a new (old) preset back into the mix, I call it “composite-ntsc-2-phase-megadrive-rainbows”. As some of you know the Genesis produced a certain rainbow effect, this preset is made to give off that accurate rainbow dithering look. So now you have two ways to get your dithering through composite either with the standard composite 2-phase ntsc preset:
Or the megadrive composite 2-phase ntsc preset:
Bringing the total count from 48 to now 56 presets to choose from. Title of the thread will no longer have the word “slot mask” in it since now 2 other crt masks have joined the pack.
- I’ve created two different types of presets, one for curved screen presets and one for flat screens. I’ve gotten asked a few times on how to turn the curvature off so to make things easier for everyone you can now choose right off the bat if you want the curved screen:
or flat screen look:
Curved and flat screen presets both have their own folders, the more options the better right?
Grab this newest update in the first post.
I’m seeing “runt” scanlines in your Shadow Mask screenshots. So far I’ve managed to eliminate those by increasing the integer scale percentage/offset.
You can take a look here if you would like to learn more.
I tried with this little camera but may not look so good/convincing to be honest. It looks like video signal is permanently trembling. I dont know how to explain it. The signal is not static like at least composite video could ever provide. But the rainbow artifacts are present as well.
Anything involving integer scaling I’ll pass on, I don’t use any form of that in my presets. If there’s a bit of “runt” scanlines so be it, everything can’t be perfect. Thanks anyway. You game on a 1440p display I believe so I’m not even sure what you’re seeing on your screen since I think I got the mask shift number wrong for 1440p displays. I know that number needs to be on 7.50 for 4k since I tested that myself.