Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Sorry this done it works fine across all my devices - phone, tablet, TV, laptop and PC and across all drivers. If you want to use custom shaders that support this like the Sony Megatron then please do they all work just as they used to.

EDIT: Just to point out scRGB has worked in this way all along - we’ve just changed HDR10 - the maths ultimately is very similar we’ve just dropped the inverse tonemapper which wasn’t really being used for the internal shaders anyway. Inverse tonemapping is a good feature that custom shaders can support but simplifies the built in shaders and the menu.

EDIT EDIT: I should probably add a hdr_inverse_tonemapper.slang that people can easily add to the end of their SDR shader preset to add the inverse tonemapper back in for the original functionality on legacy shaders.

[anikom15]

@Azurfel

Fyi: the current nightly still respects the “video_hdr_max_nits” setting in the retroarch.cfg file, despite that setting no longer being exposed in the menus. This can still be used to control UI brightness as i have previously described.

I happened to have mine set to 100 which made me think the inverse tonemapper isn’t used directly anymore. Is that not the case? Maybe there is a bug here.

It sounds like @MajorPainTheCactus ‘s intention is to only have shaders that want to use the inverse tonemapper to use it and regular SDR shaders won’t use it anymore, getting mapped to HDR in the same way that Windows does it, which is how it is suggested to be done in the current industry standard (but that standard sets SDR white to 200, Windows does this when set to ‘50’ but you can scale it to whatever you want).

The ideal peak brightness for HDR is 10 000 nits. Obviously we would never want to inverse tonemap or display UI elements at this level of brightness. A more reasonable value for fake HDR would be like 1000 or something, and for UI no more than 300 at most.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

This is exactly it - I want to make the inverse tonemapper a feature of the custom shaders as it was drastically complicating things for the average user. If I had a £1 for the number of times what do I set peak luminance to I’d be a millionaire. As you say this is how Windows, Linux etc does it and if its good enough for them its probably good enough for us.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Menu Brightness

I just bit the bullet and added the menu Brightness across the 87 files it takes to change the menu in this way (no joke). Its under Settings->User Interface->Appearance only when HDR10 or scRGB modes are selected i.e youre in HDR. It defaults to 200 nits as 80 is quite low as a default.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

hdr_inverse_tonemapper.slangp

If you want your SDR shader to have an inverse tonemapper - as in use peak and paper white nits as in the old way of HDR for more control over the mapping then add this to the end of your preset:

shaderX = “hdr/shaders/hdr_inverse_tonemap.slang”

Where X is the index of the last pass as per usual.

You can also use:

shaderX = “hdr/shaders/hdr_inverse_tonemap_config.slang”

to ignore the Settings->Video->HDR->Brightness setting and use the shader parameters instead for paper white nits.

[hunterk]

It’s possible to have a setting appear in more than one (sub)menu, if you wanted to put it in the HDR menu, as well. Up to you.

[Bolachano]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fTlTDkEjYArpBSVe2OfAXSj2DQJvXW0X?usp=sharing One of the best pixel arts on the SNES. The screenshots show the resolution and TVL in the corner.

[Azurfel]

My recommendation remains the same if this is your goal: tie both “Peak Luminance”/video_hdr_max_nits and “Paper White Luminance”/video_hdr_paper_white_nits to a single shared setting with a default of 80, 100, or 200.

Currently, the inverse tonemapper for SDR remains active, and, with a fresh retroarch.cfg, the now hidden “Peak Luminance”/video_hdr_max_nits setting is being defaulted to 1000 nits, which is an absolutely nuclear peak white brightness level for SDR.

@MajorPainTheCactus

Menu Brightness

I just bit the bullet and added the menu Brightness across the 87 files it takes to change the menu in this way (no joke). Its under Settings->User Interface->Appearance only when HDR10 or scRGB modes are selected i.e youre in HDR. It defaults to 200 nits as 80 is quite low as a default.

Amusing and probably very low priority bug: when the menu is active, this setting also controls the brightness of SDR shaders.

[Cyber]

@Bolachano

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fTlTDkEjYArpBSVe2OfAXSj2DQJvXW0X?usp=sharing

Access Denied.

@Bolachano

How do I post screenshots here without losing quality?

You just drag and drop or click on the Upload icon. There is no quality loss as far as I know but you’re limited to 4096K per file.

You can use IrfanView to recompress your image to 4095KB Max or imgbb or postimg.cc.

The post you deleted seemed fine enough.

[Cyber]

@PU786

And the Save Slot hotkeys still won’t loop anymore. Goes down to -1 but doesn’t go down from 0 to 999.

Wow! This is serious.

@PU786

The menu causes eyestrain in HDR mode

Is this on the Panasonic Z95B or the LG G5 or another Tandem RGB WOLED with RBWG subpixel layout?

If yes, can you post some close up photos of some grey or white content showing the subpixel layout of the screen using different Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor TVL settings in Mask Accurate Mode please as done here:

Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

Pictures to come when i have the time to get them properly sorted for posting. Edit: https://imgur.com/a/Kj9nR11 Taken using 2.8.0 as requested. The “8K” set got messed up somehow and wasn’t usable. I will have to retake those at a later date.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

@Azurfel

Amusing and probably very low priority bug: when the menu is active, this setting also controls the brightness of SDR shaders.

Thanks for reporting this. Just fixed it, Vulkan was reusing the constant buffer and so had the last value written to it for the game which was the menu nits value.

[PU786]

Using the current Version 2 preset for the 27…40? Aperture Grille, RWGB, couldn’t find a Mask Accurate Mode setting.

300 TVL:

600 TVL:

I can never get Megatron to look good:

My HDR Guest Advanced preset with Mask Strength set to 0.90:

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Just to say chaps (@PU786) the save slot thing has nothing to do with me (at least its very unlikely). You need to raise it on github as an issue so that someone closer to that system can fix it.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Have a play around with the colour spaces see if it makes any difference to you (under Your Display Settings in the shader parameters)

[PU786]

This picture was taken on Super, and was the best I could get the Megatron parameters set to 600 TVL. I’ve read that you don’t really support WOLED’s, and the Z95B is certainly that, so there’s probably something about the panel preventing the full use of Megatron’s capabilities.

And that’s okay, this is why we have so many different shader options to choose from. Your work is still of great value and the ways you’ve improved HDR in retroarch shine with the other HDR presets I’ve made.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

So Super isnt a Colour Space option on the Sony Megatron: its either r709,sRGB,P3,Adobe or r2020. If the main menu is affecting the colour then… Ah I know whats happening youve got Guest Advanced using Super via the menu and because the Sony Megatron ignores that setting and uses its own colour spaces its using what us equivalent to Accurate which is much more desaturated. So as I say go into the Sony Megatron’s parameter settings and change Colour Space to r2020. That should make things the same as Guest.

[Bolachano]

[Cyber]

Thank you very much.

@PU786

I can never get Megatron to look good:

@PU786

I’ve read that you don’t really support WOLED’s, and the Z95B is certainly that , so there’s probably something about the panel preventing the full use of Megatron’s capabilities.

@MajorPainTheCactus

Ah I know whats happening youve got Guest Advanced using Super via the menu and because the Sony Megatron ignores that setting and uses its own colour spaces its using what us equivalent to Accurate which is much more desaturated. So as I say go into the Sony Megatron’s parameter settings and change Colour Space to r2020. That should make things the same as Guest.

Slow down a bit there guys. @MajorPainTheCactus, @PU786 is not reporting an issue with colour spaces or anything like that.

He’s reporting something to me, just as @Azurfel did not too long ago because I wanted to refresh and document my knowledge on the capabilities and limitations of the WOLED RWBG subpixel layout.

@PU786, ever since I learned that the new tandem RGB OLED TVs used a different, updated BWRG subpixel layout, I have wanted someone to verify and assist in getting proper subpixel shader support for them.

Due to this, I always recommended the G4 as the best OLED TV for CRT Shader emulation and the G5 with this huge caveat of it possibly needing an update to CRT-Shader Support to look as well as it could.

So now that we actually have a willing participant in you, @PU786, can you confirm how the same close up shots look with the other available Display’s Subpixel Layout, i.e. RGB and BGR? It’s no surprise that RWBG/WOLED doesn’t look or work as intended on your TV as that was designed for previous WOLED TVs, which use a different RWBG layout to your Z95B and the LG G5, G6 and C6H.

Once we see those results, we can know if an existing subpixel layout works fine, or if we need to add a new one with swapped/rearranged subpixel order in order to accommodate the newer model tandem RGB displays.

What Mask, Mask Size, Mask Zoom and Mask Layout are you using for the CRT-Guest-Advanced pics? Also, can you increase the Mask Strength to 1 for those please?

[PU786]

This is as close as I could get.

Still a ways off but, slightly better? I was noticing it says RWBG instead of RGWB…I’ve always kinda presumed that was the issue.

The pictures aren’t honestly capturing the night and day difference between brightness. One is with my calibrated settings (Guest Advanced) the other is with my panel cranked to the max brightness, which, while beyond overkill and washing out most things like movies/etc. still leaves Megatron washed out and dim.

Guest Advanced is set to Mask 11 with default zoom/mask layouts. This is with Mask Strength to 1, which doesn’t make much of a difference…

This is BGR Layout, which just narrowly lowers some specular highlights in the orange bricks:

Legit my camera is hiding differences/adding differences that aren’t here. Like the difference in Sonic’s blue from the Mask Strength change, and not quite capturing the difference in the orange blocks. Not super important stuff.

[Cyber]

I’m not really interested in the full screen shots.

Take a look at the post I shared that @Azurfel made for an example of the ideal format. You can use the older Sony Megatron v1 Presets if you wish, since they definitely have a Colour Accurate/Mask Accurate shader parameter but v2 is supposed to be always Mask Accurate so it should be fine as well.

Please don’t confuse what I’m trying to do here with anything colourspace related. We just want to focus on the subpixel layouts with the aim of getting possible support for the new layout in the future.

That Mask 11 if I recall correctly is a B&W mask so it’s subpixel agnostic. There are no R,G or B, Phosphors to be found there.

Update: here is an updated CRT-Guest-Advanced Mask and Layout list:

New CRT shader from Guest + CRT Guest Advanced updates

Thanks for the template, @yuzqailo. I made some changes and added some info. # Resolution TVL Mask Width 0 1080p RGB High Aperture Mag-Green 2-width 1 1080p+ RGB Med Slot RGB 3-width 2 1080p+ RGB Med Aperture RGB 3-width 3 1440p RGB Low Shadowmask-low profile RRGGBB 6-width 4 4k RGB Low Shadowmask RRGGBB 6-width 5 1080p RGB High Aperture Mag-Green 2-width 6 1080p+ RGB Med Aperture RGB 3-width 7 1080p Black-white High Aperture BW 2-width 8 1080p+ Black-whit…

If you want to post relevant comparisons using CRT-Guest-Adanced, you have to use the R-G-B subpixel Masks, which are Mask 6 (R-G-B), Mask 10 (R-G-B-X) and Mask 12 (RR-GG-BB-X).

For camera settings, you can use Pro/Manual Mode.

ISO low enough to not overexpose the subpixels at close range, so 100 - 250 or so.

Shutter Speed matching your content refresh rate or half of it i.e. 1/60 or 30 or 1/50 1/25.

Focus Auto or Manual

WB 5000K, Auto or whatever you think looks closest to how it looks in person.

@PU786

300 TVL:

600 TVL:

Seems like I should have asked this question in the “OLED Subpixels, How do they work?” thread.