Not as far as Im aware but there’s nothing stopping them being as good. I say that as Im firmly of the belief we’re display limited not algorithmic or device limited. Basically the main goal is display brightness; moving to 8k displays might help also. There are plenty of displays that are getting pretty bright and this is a rapidly developing field so its only a matter of time before we surpass even the best CRTs in motion clarity with full masks and accurate scanline simulation. Better backlight strobing is part of this.
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This might help:
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Would it ever be possible to retire the Auto-HDR plugin via reshade in favor of suggesting people use Special K? Or are there too many retro-emulation specific aspects that couldn’t be handled that way properly.
From what I’ve read, outside of the retro gaming spheres the reshade Auto-HDR reshade plugin seems to have been lauded by many folks as a backup in case SK doesn’t work but it seems less common that comes up. From my own limited experience, I’ve tested one app (Ares emulator) where I couldn’t properly get SK and reshade working side-by-side to allow for Sony Megatron Shader+HDR, but in that case it was open-GL and seemed like Auto-HDR plugin wasn’t functioning regardless
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Why not just continue to have options and people just use what they like?
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Just a thought in case maintaining it is a pain. But having looked at a few discord groups out there it’s definitely still getting some use outside of retro gaming
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It does look like @Azurfel image at least behaviour wise. The difference between that image and your image is really the max height, fall off of the scanlines, and the fact we’re using a much larger mask. Note on @Azurfel image there are 2 sometimes 3 horizontal mask lines per scanline. Yours is much more coarse. First try lowering the max scanline height and use a finer grain mask and then lets see where you get to. @Azurfel you dont know what game your image is from by any chance? If so we can try and replicate it.
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Great shots - thanks for sharing! SpecialK is another way of getting HDR support. Yes the images will probably look darker/brighter depending in the display youre viewing them on.
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Its good to see SpecialK hdr options - pretty complete. My AutoHDR plugin was just to get the sony megatron working in Reshade - I safly dont have the time at the moment to support it more ie add bells and whistles and extra api support.
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Yeah looks like quite a few reference monitors are going to 4k nits but with a very hefty price tag -$10k,$20k greater?
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Yeah the AutoHDR plugin doesnt support opengl but maybe one day. I think the plugin is good for simplicity purposes - you can just use reshade on its own but yes the specialk option is more complete.
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Good to know its being used!
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I’m seeing what I assume is the same problem when playing 480i games with Megatron. 240p looks normal
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Ah Ive never tried running 480i games! I should try this!
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Not a clue. The user who posted it to the linked thread (Tighe) was posting images from a wide variety of games on multiple different arcade and consumer CRTs.
This is kind of making me wonder what the exact scaling tended to look like for vertical triad count on various TVL/screen size/manufacturer combinations, and how close the current options come to fitting into that curve.
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This sounds like a good idea for a new phosphor triads/CRT Mask database. It might be good practice for CRT Shader users to try to recreate things down to the phosphor triads level.
This is where the whole 5 subpixels high, 7 subpixels wide, with the horizontal slot being 1 subpixel high came from.
Note when I’m referring to height as being X subpixels high, I’m speaking specifically about LG OLED TV’s individual subpixel elements.
Read the posts leading up to this one for even more information.
So based on this comparison, it is actually a thing.
I think when I made my first slot mask preset using CRT-Guest-Advance (via Mega Bezel) I experimented with lowering the scanline (gap) strength (darkness). It probably would have been for brightness reasons or even due to strange interactions I was seeing between the scanlines and slot mask effect.
I knew I tried that slot mask pattern with the scanline type set to the faintest and it looked beautiful!
I also subsequently made presets with the traditional dark scanline gaps I was used to and had no issues eventually.
On another note, I’ve been playing around a lot more with scanline and slot mask settings and came up with some gorgeous looking (IMHO) Turbo Duo_Dreamcast presets! I just used the 600TVL setting to get away from the anomalies I had complained about previously.
After I was somewhat satisfied with those I moved onto SNES but when I switched from Aperture Grille to Slot Mask I saw some uneven looking scanlines in the blue background of the Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting title screen.
At first I eliminated this by increasing the Scanline Min to from about 20 to about 85.
Then I put on Donkey Kong Country and the first thing I noticed was that the bananas looked too “PVMish”.
I then began to play around with the Scanline Max and Min values to get to the point where the gaps were still visible but didn’t have that exaggerated look that I had observed initially while still preserving some dynamics.
I tested in a few games and came away with a feeling that I had now understood how to manipulate the scanline shapes and sizes much better now than I had before.
After tweaking and testing a couple games at the 600TVL setting, I went back to Street Fighter II Turbo and switched the TVL to 300TVL…I was completely blown away by how sharp, vibrant and beautiful my freshly tweaked preset looks at 300TVL.
I couldn’t really see anything wrong with the image from normal viewing distance although I did notice some slight diagonal patterns on certain colours, for example the light blue in sky in Blanka’s Stage.
I just lowered the NTSC Resolution a bit until it disappeared.
During my testing I noticed that depending on the Subpixel Layout, Mask Type and Scanline Shape/Size settings there can be different artifact patterns showing up in various background colours and sometimes just in general, some pleasant some not so pleasant so I think with Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor one really has to learn how to tweak the Scanline Max/Min and other Scanline settings in order to avoid such scenarios since they can make all the difference.
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Integer Scale On, Integer Scale OverScale On - Uneven Scanlines
Integer Scale On, Integer Scale OverScale Off - Even looking scanlines, but ugly vertical artifacts
It’s easier to see on an all white screen. Games in the above screenshots were Super Metroid and Super Double Dragon. Using the BSNES core.
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Can’t see your pics, but this is probably the result of bsnes doubling the resolution of 240p games for the sake of avoiding resolution changes in games with hi-res material.
You can either use Mesen-S instead, or manually override/correct the scaling (depending on your intended “Preferred Aspect Ratio” setting: 2304x2160 for Pixel Perfect, 2880x2160 for 4:3, your preference of rounding of 2632.5x2160 for NTSC, or 3195x2160 for PAL).
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My pics are in .heic format. There’s bound to be an extension/filter/decoder/viewer to display them in Windows 10.
I’ll double check my BSNES settings to see if it’s in 480p mode.
Your theory could be correct though as I haven’t noticed this behaviour in Beetle PCE.
Is Mesen-S as accurate as or better than BSNES in general?
Thanks, I’ll give these a try.
Update:
Yep, “PPU - Deinterlace” is set to ON in the Core Options.
Changing it to off didn’t eliminate the issue but it seemed to have improved it a bit. Now only every other scanline gap seems lighter.
Haven’t tried the aspect manual aspect ratios though.
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I’m reasonably sure it’s a hosting issue.
"That page doesn’t exist
The requested page was not found."
Mesen-S is cycle accurate, but includes some features bsnes doesn’t (RetroAchievements for example), and lacks others (off the top of my head, mode 7 resolution scaling/supersampling).
“PPU - Deinterlace” doesn’t effect the scaling for me. At least as far as i’ve tested, integer scaling always treats bsnes as 480p. Non-gpu screenshots and shaders do seem to treat bsnes as 240p with PPU - Deinterlace set to off tho, so this may be a bug.
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Looks like bsnes-hd beta also integer scales correctly, and supports both RetroAchievements and mode 7 resolution scaling/supersampling, so that may be the best option. I will look into this more deeply in the next week or so.
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