Thank you Cyber, I will also take a look at CRT Guest and Super XBR. The Gaussian Blur shader works perfectly already and matches the look of my CRT. Do you mean by zipping and sharing to make a preset pack? I don’t know if this is easy, as this is a Reshade setup and not Retroarch and also there is more stuff to it than just a preset in Reshade, which I will explain now.
First you need a HDR capable display, if possible an LG OLED, because I already tried it with a Philips Mini-LED monitor and even though it was a very bright one with HDR 1400, it has not looked as good as on my 800 Nits LG OLED GX.
Those LG OLED’s have a feature which is very important to achieve a convincing bright and dynamic CRT look. The feature is called “dynamic tonemapping”, which you can switch on in the menu.
If you don’t have a LG OLED I am not sure if other brands of TV’s and monitors have a similar setting. The 1400 nits Philips Mini-LED monitor for example hadn’t such a setting. Maybe MajorPainTheCactus can tell us if his Samsung QD-OLED has a similar feature.
Then you need to download the latest Reshade version with full add-on support:
During the setup choose the correct path of the emulator and then select the correct rendering API of the emulator you want to choose. I have setup my emulators with Vulkan, so this is what I choose here:
After this select “legacy effects” and “Reshade HDR shaders by Lilium” which will contain the Gaussian Blur shader and the inverse tonemapping shader:
On the next site select the add-on “AutoHDR by EndlesslyFlowering (original by MajorPainTheCactus)”:
Then finish the Reshade setup.
Now make sure your display is in HDR mode, then start your emulator.
In the Reshade settings of the emulator you have to check if the AutoHDR add-on is activated:
Then make sure the Gaussian Blur and inverse tonemapping shader are configured like this:
Note, that the target brightness setting should be adjusted according to the capabilities of your display,
in my case 800 nits for the LG GX OLED. You can also play around with GaussianBlurStrength setting, for me anything between 0.600 and 0.800 works well depending on how soft I want the image to look.
After this download the Reshade Megatron pack from MajorPainTheCactus:
and unzip the files in your “Shaders” folder within the emulator folder:
When done correctly, open your emulator again and you should see the Megatron available:
Now configure Megatron exactly like this:
Note, that the “CRT_Height” setting at the bottom has to be changed to 2160, if you have a 4K display.
This is very important, otherwise your Slotmask will not look correct. Also very important is the order of the shaders: At the top needs to be the Gaussian Blur filter, then Megatron and at the bottom Lilium’s inverse tonemapping. If you mess up the order, it will not look correct!
If you have done everything correctly, you should now have an image which will be extremely close to a real CRT. In my humble opinion this is the most authentic shader configuration I have yet seen. I can compare it directly to a CRT, so this is not only by guessing how it should look. This configuration works also for 2D games, but here I prefer slightly different settings with scanlines, which I will post later too.
I hope, that I have not forgotten something and if so I will post it afterwards.
Here is another screenshot I took from my OLED:
This is the game Soulblade running in Duckstation. I cannot capture it perfectly with my phone camera, but I can assure you, that this shader configuration looks very authentic.
Here is what it would look like without the shader:
Focus also on the green writings / fonts at the top and how well the shader masks them like a real CRT. The shader masks text within older games very well as you can see, without looking weird and fuzzy like it would look without shaders. Please download the pictures and zoom in, so you can see very closely how the Slotmask works.
Text without shader:
Text with shader:
Even if the internal resolution within the emulators is setup to 4x or beyond, the shader will mask it so well, that it does not look weird, like it normally would. It looks very analogous, soft and at the same time very dynamic and vibrant and hides the flaws of older games very well. I hope you can try it out!
If you don’t have a HDR capable display, you can also leave the AutoHDR plugin and Lilium’s tonemapping out of the configuration and just use GaussianBlur and Megatron. Configuration is otherwise the same. You will have a convincing mask and softness, but the brightness and pop will not be the same as with HDR. Currently I think a 4K LG OLED with the dynamic tonemapping setting is what will work best. From the model LG OLED 9 series upwards to current 4 series should all be fine, older generations like the 6,7 and 8 series - I’m not sure.
It gives an additional blur, but different than the GaussianBlur filter. The image and Slotmask blends together even more. But be sure to use a chromatic abberation filter on top within Reshade, above Gaussian Blur. You can also use Megatron to add chromatic abberation, but the shader from Cshade is very easy and does not need any configuration.
). They also make buzzing noises, do not have the same perfect black level like an OLED - close though - and the 27 inches are small compared to my 55 inch OLED.
