Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

[Dennis1]

I think I found the cleanest and crispest shader preset I have ever used with the Megatron shader. Yesterday I tried Megatron in Retroarch for comparison with Reshade Megatron and somehow it works different or I made some mistakes in the Reshade configuration, I am not sure yet. I changed a few settings in the Retroarch Megatron shader and this is what I got:

Every single pixel is scaled accurately with an Aperture Grille phosphor on top and scanlines look perfect now in my eyes, unobtrusively and not thick. It’s the first time I have seen these games that crisp and clean.

Mortal Kombat is one of those games which never looked satisfying enough in my eyes and now I am finally happy with the result and it reminds me of the old days in the Arcade playing it. This is how I remember it, very crisp and sharp.

Also I did not use any blur or NTSC filter this time, because I think it would take away the fidelity.

All pictures are in SDR as always, so please make sure that HDR is activated and SDR slider to maximum to view them in full brightness. And in Fullscreen of course.

What is your opinion about this preset? With Lilium’s HDR inverse tonemapping this looks insane on my OLED TV. @ Cyber I have not forgotten the dedicated thread, but I need to do some further testing before I do it. Some differences between Megatron in Retroarch and Megatron in Reshade are not yet clear to me and I try to figure them out.

What a difference this shader makes:

[Cyber]

@Dennis1

What is your opinion about this preset?

I’d say it looks pristine, immaculate but it’s really what you think about it that matters.

@Dennis1

@Cyber I have not forgotten the dedicated thread, but I need to do some further testing before I do it. Some differences between Megatron in Retroarch and Megatron in Reshade are not yet clear to me and I try to figure them out.

You take your time man. No pressure. You should do that for you not for anyone else. These definitely look shareable though as well as the ones you posted before.

On another note, I’m glad to finally be seeing users sharing different Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor presets. About a year (or maybe 2) ago, I lamented the lack of buzz and camaraderie concerning this awesome shader and it’s surrounding HDR and efficiency concepts.

[Cyber]

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some screenies!

Please show off what crt shaders can do!

It’s Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor (+passes from CRT-Guest-Advanced-NTSC+SuperXBR+Grade) so brighten your screen to view. [Street Fighter II' - Champion Edition (Japan)-240706-051626] [Street Fighter II' - Champion Edition (Japan)-240706-051641] [Street Fighter II' - Champion Edition (Japan)-240706-051652] [Street Fighter II' - Champion Edition (Japan)-240706-051718] [Street Fighter II' - Champion Edition (Japan)-240706-051731] [Street Fighter II' - Champion Edition (Japan)-240706-051…

[c9f5fdda06]

@Cyber on my LG C9, it’s the case that all 3 RGB pixels can’t be used along with the white subpixel for extra brightness simultaneous (ie 4 Subpixels can’t be on at the same time). This means that the ability to clip the mask near white like crt-guest-advanced allows is very useful for using with OLED HDR (WOLED).

[Cyber]

@c9f5fdda06

on my LG C9, it’s the case that all 3 RGB pixels can’t be used along with the white subpixel for extra brightness simultaneous (ie 4 Subpixels can’t be on at the same time).

I guess that’s the same with all WOLED displays. Whether you would like to see additional non-RGB subpixels being lit alongside, overlapping or in between the RGB subpixels used to reproduce the RGB Phosphor stripes is up to user preference of course.

@c9f5fdda06

This means that the ability to clip the mask near white like crt-guest-advanced allows is very useful for using with OLED HDR (WOLED).

Please elaborate as it feels as though you’ve stopped a bit short of expressing or explaining fully the thought behind the statement. I could be wrong though.

If you look at the first half of this thread, a lot of the conversation was about how to get rid of weird extra subpixels appearing in WOLED screenshots.

Simulating Mask clipping using additional subpixels isn’t something that I’ve really delved into. Those are the kinds of parameters that I turn off whenever I encounter them, anyone who’s been following my presets should know that by now.

I would prefer for an optical phenomenon like this to occur using the brute force brightness of the RGB subpixels being used to simulate the RGB phosphors.

Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

This never occurs. All 4 subpixels are never on at the same time. So if RGB subpixels are on white is definitely going to be off. In my most recent photo which included elements of the RetroArch Menu you could see this phenomenon clearly while the white menu text and lines definitely appeared pure white, which suggests that the white subpixel was being used to display pure white elements. This also lines up with what LG has been saying about the use of the white subpixel to make the TV brighte…

Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

The subpixels only matter as long as they’re visible to the eye, which is a function of viewing distance, pixel density and visual acuity (within reason; videophilia/audiophilia “golden” body parts notwithstanding). Beyond that threshold, we just draw the mask in whole pixels and move on. Based on Trogglemonkey’s calculations, we should be able to do that at around 6K res for non-weird CRTs (i.e., very high pitch). Based on Apple’s “retina” display designations, it looks like a PPI between 200 …

[western]

I did end up getting it working, my problem was that of the handful of games I like to use for testing the most, cause I know them so well and feel I know what should “look right” they just happened to have either a dgvoodoo or reshade that was like just slightly out of date and I didn’t realize. so I updated everything and I’ve swapped everything over to lillum autohdr. I use the BangOlufsen preset with a ntsc shader for consoles and I made a reshade copy of the Viewsonic monitor preset for pc games. I just want things to look like they would on a normal display you would of had back then, I have no interest in fancy sony pvms. some of those up close just look like an lcd but with horizontal black lines. no, I want the fuzzy hash marks.

for console stuff I tried gaussian blur but I ended up using the port of ntsc adaptive instead, I liked the look of that better, except dolphin had glitches with it so there I did use gaussian blur. everything looks good. the only gap I have in shader coverage is opengl stuff now (mainly old quake engine games and such, xemu (xemu also for some reason I have to set either the shader to 1080 or the tvl to 800 to make it look like it does set to 4k 600 tvl on anything else?), and standalone dosbox (dosbox-x has a direct3d renderer but I’m not having much luck getting it to look right but the dosbox core in retroarch looks good.)

I’m not gonna use reshade with retroarch though, I’d rather stick to the built in shaders. I don’t want to tweak settings for each core and also in ps1 games in retroarch the startup logo and certain menu screens in games look higher res like they’re supposed to, whereas duckstation with reshade, the startup logo looks fuzzy and low res, I’m assuming because you have to manually set the resolution in reshade, but retroarch is able to just adapt to changing resolutions.

[Dennis1]

Thanks for your feedback, good to know that it’s working now for you and it was only because of older versions of Reshade.

I completely understand if you don’t like the sterile look of a PVM. I am also not a big fan of high TV line CRT’s and I just tried to mimic a medium TVL Sony Trinitron with my presets or a 31 KHz Arcade CRT. I am kind of a purist sometimes and try to make my presets as accurate and clean as possible. But other times I think, that it’s just too sharp and some games need an NTSC shader on top to blur those pixels together. It actually depends on my mood and the game I want to play.

Regarding your issues I am not sure how these can be solved and without pictures it’s hard to tell anyway. But if you use Reshade with standalone emulators outside of Retroarch, make sure, that the order in which your shaders are arranged is correct. For example, Lilium’s tonemapping always needs to be at the bottom. If I put it above an NTSC or the Megatron shader it will look totally wrong. Just try various positions of the shader arrangement in Reshade and as you already know be careful of the CRT_Height setting (vertical resolution of the game). If this is wrong, those scanlines can’t work correctly and you will end up with artifacts and wrong scaling.

[kanjieater]

@MajorPainTheCactus - Thank you for the reshade version of this!! I’m trying out https://github.com/MajorPainTheCactus/SonyMegatron-ReShade With PCSX2. I’m not seeing the auto HDR doing anything than look like hdr isn’t supported, but is on - it’s that classic washed out “I don’t support HDR”-kind of look. SDR (with monitor’s hdr on)

HDR (with monitor’s hdr on)

fyi I’m using this monitor https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/lg/27gr95qe-b

[Cyber]

This user had a similar issue and it had something to do with ReShade not being up to date.

Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

I did end up getting it working, my problem was that of the handful of games I like to use for testing the most, cause I know them so well and feel I know what should “look right” they just happened to have either a dgvoodoo or reshade that was like just slightly out of date and I didn’t realize. so I updated everything and I’ve swapped everything over to lillum autohdr. I use the BangOlufsen preset with a ntsc shader for consoles and I made a reshade copy of the Viewsonic monitor preset for p…

[kanjieater]

Thanks for the response - I’m using the latest 6.1.1 so I should be up to date

[western]

for pcsx2 you want the lilium version of autohdr and lilium’s inverse tonemapping shader

GitHub - EndlesslyFlowering/ReShade_HDR_shaders: ReShade shaders focused on...

[kanjieater]

Interesting - I might give that a try too, though the only reason I wanted HDR was to work well with things like the Megatron shader which is supposed to use the AutoHdr component. I’m not sure how the megatron CRT emulation shader would play with an external HDR shader (I’m very new to reshade, CRT emulation shaders, and HDR😅)

[western]

you still use it with sony megatron, their autohdr shader is a fork of major pain’s original one, but you’ll set megatron to sdr because the inverse tonemapping shader is doing the tonemapping

make sure the shaders are in the right order. autohdr will say it’s not working, ignore that. if inverse tonemapping says all that about scRGB it’s working.

[kanjieater]

Ohhh! It seems that my add-on are not loading. Thanks for your screenshots. I can’t seem to get my addons to load, and I cant change these one’s order. I’m sure I’m missing something obvious… but can’t place it

[Cyber]

@kanjieater

I can’t seem to get my addons to load, and I cant change these one’s order. I’m sure I’m missing something obvious… but can’t place it

Have a read of this:

Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

This is how I set everything up and it works for me: [Screenshot 2024-07-01 162747] [Screenshot 2024-07-01 154529] [Screenshot 2024-07-01 154727] I also get the error message in Reshade at the addon tab, that HDR support is not enabled, but it works nonetheless and HDR is activated from Windows side and the TV running in HDR. And it works the same way in Duckstation and PCSX2 if I choose DirectX 11 or 12 instead of Vulkan and install Reshade with the correct API. DXGI Swapchain is also n…

Also this:

Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

[western]

not sure but I have my addons in their own folder to help me keep things straight. as an example:

[kanjieater]

Ok - i thought the link you shared had everything in it including the addons, didn’t realize the addon github page was a different look. I’ve got the 64bit loading for pcsx2. Unfortunately it seems to not know that HDR is on - not sure why as HDR is definitely showing as on for that monitor. ?

[kanjieater]

Oh! Cyber already answered my question. it’s a bug, but it should “still work”

But I am getting stuck still on why my lilium’s tone mapping won’t load like you’s was

[kanjieater]

Is your death to pixels reshade preset only for TMNT? Or is it general enough it can be used for anything? I was originaly planning on using your presets - thank you for your work.

[Cyber]

@kanjieater

Or is it general enough it can be used for anything?

Yes, they are and they include a couple presets for other games too for example, “The Messenger”.

They’re a bit long in the tooth though and were made for an old version of the GDV Re-Shade port.

The user has to manually set the 2 resolution settings correctly for each game.

@kanjieater

I was originaly planning on using your presets

The stuff found here is way more advanced than those though. You might even be better off with the updated CRT-Guest-Advanced Re-Shade port using default settings.

@kanjieater

thank you for your work.

You’re welcome and I thank @guest.r, @MajorPainTheCactus, Lilium, @Dogway, @HyperspaceMadness, trogglemonkey and all the other CRT Shader developers who made this possible.