Apologies for the late reply, hmm this difference might be due to the reshade port being slightly out of date. Do you want the reshade to look like the retroarch version or vice versa?
2 Likes
Hi so although the shader parameters let you select 1080p, 4K etc it doesn’t mean you’re not able to get the very best experience for your monitor/resolution. All really these settings are doing is selecting the best CRT mask for your resolution to emulate slot mask/aperture grille/shadow mask. Those masks are really mostly the same thing.
For your resolution to get a perfect slot mask or aperture grille emulation you need 4 pixels for the mask (the default mask for 4K and 600TVL). Therefore the maximum CRT resolution you can emulate is 1440p / 4 pixels = 360TVL. Thats basically quite low to mid level CRT from the 80’s. 600TVL is towards the high end for the 1980’s.
There is a two pixel mask that is also widely used and that will get you a 720TVL image. You can get this by going to 1080p and selecting 600TVL.
1 Like
Hi @Dennis1 it really does sound like there’s a bug in one of my masks for the type of display you’re selecting/using. I will take a look at this when I get the chance and see if I can spot it. When you’ve been playing around with the mask did you see any changes? Just asking to make sure you’re editing the right mask obviously.
Do keep me updated on your notebook display this sounds really interesting - I will say that layout doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence but then I use my phone’s AMOLED display and its got a really strange sub pixel layout but you can’t tell because its so dense and impossible to distinguish with my eyesight at least (I dont need reading glasses at least)
1 Like
Thank you very much! I’m going to try these settings ^^
2 Likes
No, the only changes are, that the colors change. There is no movement of the “phosphor” rows. I tried all combinations, but no success.
Both panels and the controller are on the way and should arrive within next two weeks. I have the feeling, that the Mini-LED panel will throw out the better picture, as it should be much brighter than the OLED panel. The contrast or black level advantage of the OLED panel might not be important here, as Mini-LED panels have many individual LED’s to deliver also high contrast levels and keep blooming or halo effects under control. For games I think this is less important anyway in comparison to watching movies which generally have more dark scenes. Also Mini-LED panels have the advantage of a RGB subpixel layout, like your Eve Spectrum Monitor.
But as you mentioned, it is almost impossible to see any differences as the “phosphors” are just too tiny, so despite the brightness advantage of the Mini-LED panel they should look pretty identical.
Before I ordered both panels I looked out for Notebooks and Monitors with Mini-LED panels and they are very expensive, below 1000 euros there is not a lot you can buy, especially with 4K resolution which is mandatory for good looking masks. So for around 120,- euros for the Mini-LED panel plus controller board it could be an absolute bargain if everything works. It does not have a case though, as it is just the pure panel, but there are also solutions for this, for example taking an old 15,6 inch PC monitor and swapping out the internals.
Building compact Arcade cabinets with Mini-LED panels is also an idea I have in my mind, as you can get pretty close to CRT quality with such good shaders like Megatron. In my opinion much better than those cabinets which just use cheap standard LCD panels and raw pixels without shader.
2 Likes
If possible, I’d like to make reshade shaders consistent with retroarch.
Also an additional note about TVL: For SDTVs this seems to have been very much related to physical size. 360 TVL seems to be roughly what you can expect for 20" size. ~450-500 TVL is what I’ve seen advertised for larger (like 24" upwards) TVs.
For 1440p, you could pick the 4K setting and the 800 TVL which results in a 3pixel mask = 480 TVL.
Actually, because what matters ultimately here are the pixel of the masks and the actual TVL numbers are rounded down or up in various ways anyway because of the technical limitations (resulting then in 540 TVL for standard resolutions etc.), perhaps some additional explanation could be useful in the parameters? It seems to be confusing to a lot of people. 
2 Likes
Having used both, I agree and think the reshade needs updated settings to match that of retroarch.
2 Likes
Hopefully you have these by now! I agree the mini led because of its pure brightness will probably be the better display for this particular use case. The big thing though is what it looks like in motion. A great game to test clarity is Dynamite Headdy on the Megadrive as the first level zips by automatically at a fast pace and has lots of signage with text to read.
On my CRTs this is all crystal clear but my QD-OLED and IPS-LCD is not. Funnily enough the best flat screen is my phone an AMOLED 120hz display - it gets quite close to my CRTs.
1 Like
Yeah agreed its all a bit confusing. Mind you TVL itself is a very confusing number as its the number of vertical lines across the screen to the height of the screen across. This makes sense when you think about it but is super unintuitive. If you can think of ways for the parameters to be clearer Im very open to suggestions!
1 Like
Yes youre both right - ill find some time - theres only a few small changes but they are quite important!
1 Like
I’ve been trying to get these up and running with my new HDR monitor (Innocn 27M2U-D) but I’m having some sort of issue that I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of. With various Megatron shaders (including Cyberlord’s versions) the resulting image is always dark and kind of brownish grey - nothing like the nice photos I’ve seen in this thread and nothing like the CRT I’m comparing it against. I was, however, able to get a sort of okay looking image out of a couple of Cyberlord’s presets but the color was really bizarre looking - overly lime greens and garish bright reds.
I have HDR turned on in Windows and Retroarch, my nvidia settings are pretty much at defaults for my 3070, and the shader parameters are set to the default settings. I’m running the Steam version of 1.16.0. I can tell that HDR is on in retroarch because the menu looks obviously different and box art images are clearly not SDR. Other HDR content outside of retroarch looks fine on the display and doesn’t have any obvious color or brightness issues. It even gets eye-searingly bright sometimes. I’ve also gone through HDR calibration in Windows.
Other non-hdr specific retroarch shaders look great with fairly accurate colors and are plenty bright even with scanlines so I don’t think it’s an issue with the brightness or color reproduction of the display itself (but who knows, I guess. I don’t have another HDR display to try it on). I’ve tried D3D12 and Vulkan and it seems to look the same either way. I’ve also spent some time messing around with the shader parameters and tinkering hasn’t really gotten me anywhere. I took a few HDR screenshots that should hopefully illustrate what I’m seeing (if this is a lousy way to demonstrate I could try taking pictures of the display):
SMW: https://mega.nz/file/33gxiKxI#s922T5x_KCK18CzO6Y64lPJJ0ktFvperp8MvYtljqKI
Super Mario Bros NES: https://mega.nz/file/nvZXwTSR#UYy4A6bE3Mmzfsw86vIgKHO3wushZKdyr40mAKaQ-3g
Any idea what might be going on? Thanks
2 Likes
Those screenshots look fine on my system, which suggests that it’s an output or display setting problem.
It kind of sounds like it might be chroma subsampling? Double check that you have 444 chroma working in HDR at the same refresh rate you are using for RetroArch: https://www.geeks3d.com/20141203/how-to-quickly-check-the-chroma-subsampling-used-with-your-4k-uhd-tv/
2 Likes
For a more complete representation of what you’re experiencing, good quality photos of the screen should definitely help.
What NES Palette are you using? I use Sony CXA2025AS.
I only got a chance to look at the SDR versions of the images so far but I don’t expect the HDR ones to tell a different story. I would have to concur with @Azurfel. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with the images in the jxr screenshots you shared.
You mention Windows HDR Calibration. Does that even have an effect on Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor?
Did you adjust the “Peak Luminance” and “Paper White Luminance” settings to match your display?
Also, did you adjust the “Display’s Subpixel Layout” setting to match your display?
Did you remember to update your Slang Shaders as well as install the recommended version of CRT-Guest-CRT-Advanced-NTSC?
1 Like
Essay incoming: I think I’ve got my issue figured out and I believe it was mostly thanks to me misunderstanding some things but I’ll elaborate for anyone else who comes across my posts here in the future:
It kind of sounds like it might be chroma subsampling? Double check that you have 444 chroma working in HDR at the same refresh rate you are using for RetroArch: https://www.geeks3d.com/20141203/how-to-quickly-check-the-chroma-subsampling-used-with-your-4k-uhd-tv/
Thanks, I checked this and it looked fine to me so I think I’m set correctly there.
What NES Palette are you using? I use Sony CXA2025AS.
I tried a bunch but couldn’t settle on one that I thought looked right. I switched to Sony CXA2025AS and it actually matched the look of my NES on my CRT very closely so I’ll leave it there. Thanks for the suggestion.
You mention Windows HDR Calibration. Does that even have an effect on Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor?
I think it must - it creates a color profile which I believe is used system wide.
Did you adjust the “Peak Luminance” and “Paper White Luminance” settings to match your display?
I spent a lot of time messing with Peak Luminance but didn’t really tweak Paper White Luminance very much (for some reason I thought I would need to keep it pretty low - I guess because the default settings are 800 / 200 so I was staying close to that ratio). I found that by setting Peak Luminance to my display’s claimed number and putting Paper White Luminance close to that value or 200 to 400 points under it I got much better results. I believe this was my main issue.
Also, did you adjust the “Display’s Subpixel Layout” setting to match your display?
I’m not really sure about this one. The monitor is a mini LED IPS but the manufacturer barely has any information available. Regardless, I tried the different settings for this in the shader parameters and none of them seemed dramatically different when viewed from a few feet away at least.
Did you remember to update your Slang Shaders as well as install the recommended version of CRT-Guest-CRT-Advanced-NTSC?
I did do this and I believe everything is installed correctly.
So, I believe I had a few different things going on, none of which are the fault of the shaders.
- Windows 11’s HDR implementation is finicky and really likes to drop out of the HDR mode completely or get stuck in some weird halfway mode where greens and reds are totally blown out but everything else looks dark and strange. This seems to be exacerbated by me going back and forth between retroarch cores and shaders that may or may not support vulkan/d3d12/d3d11. It is really easy to get Windows stuck doing this and the only way to fix it is toggling HDR back and forth to reset it. Probably also need to restart retroarch and maybe even Windows itself if the issue persists
- As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t try setting Paper White Luminance high enough. Once I did this, it fixed my problem with the dark output (at least once the Windows HDR problems were sorted).
- I think I kind of misunderstood the objective of these presets. I think for some reason I was expecting a general one size fits all sort of reference image but the real goal is to recreate the appearance of these very specific models so of course things are going to look different than the cheap CRT I’m used to.
So, for anyone with this monitor (Innocn 27M2U-D) or similar I had especially good results almost out of the box with the sony-pvm-2730-hdr and jvc-professional-TM-H1950CG-hdr presets.
2 Likes
It’s probably RGB given the layout used by a different model from the same line. (see the RTINGS INNOCN 27M2V review Text Clarity section.)
Semi-relatedly, you’ll also want to make sure Megatron is set to Colour Accurate mode and “Original” for Original/Vivid.
Just to verify, when using HDR shaders, you have HDR enabled in RetroArch’s settings, and you are turning on HDR in Windows before you start RetroArch?
Also, look into using CRU to restart your GPU driver. Much simpler than fully restarting every single time something weird happens.
2 Likes
what kind of tv should i buy to not deal with mask layout issues, a normal 4k hdr tv?
1 Like
It’s probably RGB given the layout used by a different model from the same line. (see the RTINGS INNOCN 27M2V review Text Clarity section.)
Semi-relatedly, you’ll also want to make sure Megatron is set to Colour Accurate mode and “Original” for Original/Vivid.
Thanks, I wasn’t sure which settings to consider the default for those.
Just to verify, when using HDR shaders, you have HDR enabled in RetroArch’s settings, and you are turning on HDR in Windows before you start RetroArch?
Yeah, that’s correct. I’ve just been leaving it on in Windows and Retroarch. Seems to mostly stay set correctly if I don’t do anything weird inside of Retroarch.
Also, look into using CRU to restart your GPU driver. Much simpler than fully restarting every single time something weird happens.
Just checked this out and it looks like a handy tool. Will give it a try the next time things go weird.
Thanks for your all of your help (and Cyber as well). I appreciate it!
2 Likes
I got both Displays today:
Unfortunately the company didn’t send me the ordered Mini-LED panel “BOE NE156QUM-NM1”, despite telling them before ordering, that I need the exact same model and not any alternative.
The OLED display is correct though.
Second problem is, that the controller, which I ordered from another seller, did arrive a week ago in germany, but the delivery person from the Hermes parcel company just scanned the package twice on two different days as “refused from receiver”. On both days I was 100% at home and he didn’t even ring the bell…
Thanks to this guy, the package with the controller is on the way back to china and the seller from china thinks I really have refused the package, which is not true.
I am a bit exhausted after getting a wrong display and no controller board as you can imagine and am kind of tired of ordering everything again.
@ snoring
You got a really nice Mini-LED monitor, which I had also in my mind before ordering the Notebook displays, it was just too expensive at nearly 700 euros for me.
What is your opinion with the shader now and can you maybe post some screenshots? I am pretty curious how the shader looks on such a bright Mini-LED monitor.
1 Like
I’ve really been enjoying it. Wasn’t too sure at first… it looked nice but is a lot bigger than I’m used to. Got over that pretty quickly though and it’s been great. The shaders look great on it too, though I haven’t spent too much time tinkering since I got a couple looks that I like for what I’m mostly playing right now (SNES). Took a few photos with the pvm 2730 preset (although I’ll say that these photos don’t really do it justice and my phone’s camera had a pretty tough time here. It looks much more vibrant and bright in reality.)
3 Likes
I think this is my biggest complaint honestly with the varients of this shader. I have a 48" OLED and the pixels look much bigger than they should be. If I play around with the scanline settings I can get it looking more “normal”, but by default everything looks enlarged for some reason almost like a dot-matrix grid.
1 Like