That’s really weird because I’m seeing almost the opposite in other examples- in the closeup of Link for example the partially lit phosphors in the black outline are barely brighter on the LCD compared to the CRT (it’s a very small difference between the two, though).
I’m assuming the PVM is calibrated and you’ve already done a flyback pot adjustment?
“I think the PC Engine also did some unique tricks at the output level in order to display additional colours which is why they added a Composite/RGB toggle in Mednafen/Beetle.”
I think that toggle functions more as a correction really, the actual hardware doesn’t output RGB after all without a mod, and the Composite palette accounts for what the internal color conversion actually does. The old RGB palette may still be suited more for some games because of their origin/development process (e.g. Loom was mentioned over at the Pcengineboards as it was ported from different platforms).
So just played around with the settings and taken photo’s at 100 ISO. So although I think we’re much closer than last night I think the colours are a bit off still. Ignore the fact the LCD is darker for a moment as thats quite fixable its the gradient of the rain drops that is the important thing and proving quite hard to match.
I’m going to implement saturation to fix my original issues but maybe I need to fix those and then come back to this issue as then the colours are calibrated correctly to the PVM.
The jail bar gaps issue is just a horizontal sharpness tweak but I probably need to recalibrate all those settings once the overall colours are correct as it does have an effect on the size and shape of the phosphors and scanlines (and vice versa).
I’ve changed the position of the photos to be more central to the CRT as my PVM’s have larger convergence issues out at the edges which is important in such a image.
Just a single shot of the edge of the waterfall at 100 ISO on my LCD (I’ll try and get the CRT version at a later date):
I will come back to this in due course as its quite a good test case.
CRT Photo: OnePlus 8 Pro Camera: Pro Mode, ISO 100, WB 6500K, Aperture Speed 1/60, Auto Focus, 48MPixel JPEG.
LCD Photo: OnePlus 8 Pro Camera: Pro Mode, ISO 100, WB 6500K, Aperture Speed 1/60, Auto Focus, 48MPixel JPEG.
Yes I think something is a bit kooky. One thing I will say is that (as with every CRT) my CRT exhibits different issues in different parts of the screen. So this could be just different parts of the screen but I’m not sure on that - further investigation is needed!
When you say calibrated do you mean convergence or colour or both? I tried my best to minimize the deconvergence but with such an old and large CRT its a bit like whack a mole. I think its reasonable though. By flyback pot adjustment I presume thats the HSTAT dial in Sony PVM parlance (I think it is)? If so yes its the first thing I tweaked. As for colour its a very old set and I’m not sure there is an awful lot exposed to be able to tweak. I just set it to ‘NORM’ settings which are supposed to be its standard default settings.
As to your further points about colour sadly I use a MiSTer through the SCART socket and so those buttons dont do anything. It might be interesting to put an NTSC signal into it though but to be honest I’m not sure how I would do that - there’s not a whole lot of connections on the back.
I’m going to do some video’s at some point to deal with blur. My monitor is supposed to be one of the best LCD’s dealing with it (according to Blur Busters) but I’m unable to switch on the backlight strobing as its disabled for HDR (because backlight strobing dulls the brightness). I’ve asked to get this changed because there are a lot of other reaosns to have it on with backlight strobing but haven’t had any answer. Its supposed to be better than a plasma display at coping with blur but I haven’t been able to test.
In answer to your question I think both are quite close in terms of the experience. The main difference being one is curved and one is flat.
Thanks! I couldn’t have done it without your help and everybody here that has helped and pointed out things. Its been a great feedback loop. Still there are more challenges ahead!
What connections ARE available on your pvm?
I’m currently in the middle of trying to get my Mister to do all the signals… Currently the only thing I can’t cover is SCART/RGB. (If this RF setup works, I’ll be able to cover RF, Composite, S-Video, and Component from my Mister into my CRT.)
From the manual above basically it has a RGB SCART socket (AV connector), RGB VGA Socket (Digital RGB inputs) and a load of BNC connectors for composite. I only have MiSTer’s for less clutter - I know that sacriledge to some people but I really cant be bothered with the million consoles lined up with a million cables, I already have enough to contend with all the original controllers.
The analog board I’m currently using with my Mister does all those signals (I listed above, besides RF, gambling on that one 
) from a Sega Saturn A/V port. (I could DM you a link if you’re interested)
Well, at the very least if you wanted to do composite as cheaply as possible from the Mister you’d need either that composite/S-Video adapter Antonio sells or use some VGA or HDMi converters. (IMHO easier to just do the analog board or the composite/S-Video adapter).
The Scart socket should also take composite (i.e. NTSC and PAL) signals, the 9pin RGB input is likely for CGA (and maybe EGA when limited to 200 line modes, basically generally computers which use digital RGB). VGA=analogue RGB, + that would imply 480p at least.
See I thought the SCART plug supported that, but the manual hurt my head
So do we think MiSTer can output a composite signal via its 9pin D-SUB analogue out and its just a case of swapping over the cable to a composite SCART cable rather than the component SCART cable I currently have? I’m not sure I see that on this page:
That I/O board does not do composite video via the analog output, no.
AFAIK, MiSTer doesn’t/can’t currently do composite on the FPGA and instead just outputs RGB that then runs through a composite encoder chip. That’s fine, of course, but it’s not going to be accurate to a console’s own composite output, which were often tweaked in various ways to improve the image (resulting in, for example, the characteristic Mega Drive rainbows that dannyld loves so much).
I believe Analogue’s consoles produce the composite signal directly on the FPGA and are oscilloscope-exact to the original console’s composite output (IIRC, that’s one of kevtris’ areas of interest/expertise).
Yes I thought that was the case. If it was easy to reproduce on my CRT I might have tried to do it. Hopefully at some point MiSTer starts to support such features - I’m not an amazing fan of its Genesis core as it has a number problems like a lack of pause, a very temperamental support of SNAC, poor region detection and I’ll add this to the list (to be fair this is probably the case of the rest of the cores).
Yeah, there’s an existing, permissively-licensed NTSC modulation/demodulation verilog implementation that could potentially be implemented in the MiSTer framework, but I think that would ultimately not be any better than the current external adapter method, and it would need to happen in the cores themselves to really get what we’re wanting/envisioning.
[OT] The Genesis/MD core at least has very nice sound![/OT]
Another big anouncement: I’ve made the shader work in SDR!
What I’ve noticed is that displays that support high nits in HDR can also have a SDR mode that is brighter than a lot of ‘HDR’ displays. So for example a Samsung QN90a has a peak luminance in SDR of ~1350nits - thats A LOT!
Yes the HDR mode gets even brighter and has a number of other benefits BUT the SDR mode should be fine for this shader and retro gaming in general as the control isn’t necessarily required.
What this allows us to do is have a SDR output from the PC/Raspberry Pi/console etc and output it to the display in SDR and then we just whack up the display ‘brightness’ to max and bingo.
This also opens the door to having backlight strobing on my display (as this wasn’t supported in HDR).
It also allows people to use different Retroarch drivers like glCore and gl.
Also Nvidia’s drivers have been a bit temperamental with respect to HDR so hopefully this nails those issues too. @BendBombBoom @Deam hopefully this might help in fixing your issues too - please let me know!
I support sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces in SDR at the moment - do let me know of any others you’d like supported.
Here’s a photo of what SDR looks like - really quite good in terms of brightness on my Eve Spectrum.
LCD Photo: OnePlus 8 Pro Camera: Pro Mode, ISO 200, WB 6500K, Aperture Speed 1/60, Auto Focus, 48MPixel JPEG.
I will submit this shortly in the next day or two with some more colour tweaking stuff too.
@Nesguy this is my shader on my Eve Spectrum with backlight strobing on (implemented by Blur Busters) I have to say in motion (I’ll try and get a video for you) it looks remarkably like my CRT.
I’ve had to lower the aperture speed down to 1/30 as it was making the image overly dark as it was catching the strobe I think.
LCD Photo: OnePlus 8 Pro Camera: Pro Mode, ISO 200, WB 6500K, Aperture Speed 1/30, Auto Focus, 48MPixel JPEG.
Hey this sounds quite awesome!!! 
Now for the questions!!! 
What is the difference visually for you on your on your screen between the HDR version and SDR Version?
I’m also curious what this will look like on OLED since on OLED the whole backlight wouldn’t be cranked up like on an LCD.
Will it be 2 different shaders for the HDR and SDR setups (each with a different color depth on the last pass)?
Also fantastic work on the color correction! It’s really great to see your color correction with a close match to your real world hardware 
In the crt-sony-pvm-4k-hdr preset I noticed that the white temperature for was 2800, and I was wondering if you could explain why.
Maybe you will want to come up with a new awesome name for your shader since there will be hdr and sdr versions of it?
Just a mention to everybody following this, @MajorPainTheCactus has been extremely generous with adding many of my requested tweaks to how the shader is organized in the code to make it easier for me to integrate it in the Mega Bezel. I wanted to give a huge thank you for this!!!
Not at all thank you for your guidance and patience!
I’ve got to go to sleep now but very quickly with respect to 2800 - it’s an offset of the white point for the CRT color systems white point so PAL, NTSC-U D65 and NTSC-J D93.
As @rafan I think pointed out above my PVM has a white point of D93 so I have to add 2800 to the D65 temperature of NTSC-U to get the right look i.e 6504 + 2800 = 9304 which is one below D93.
Also there’s just one shader - SDR/HDR is switchable in the shader - I think the RT format doesn’t matter as it’s a UNORM and as long as I don’t write over 1.0 to it it all works out because the back buffer is the standard 8888_UNORM I think. It seems to work at least.
A slight reduction in brightness - I’m not sure what the peak luminance is in SDR mode for my monitor but it’ll probably be less than the HDR mode. That’s all just guesses though.
The main problem with OLEDs are the WRGB layout - it just ruins the look of the shader AFAIK. I’d love for people to try again but fundamentally you can’t remove the W elements which a CRT never had. This effects all shaders though and people seem to have been happy with the image so all this is subjective. Again I’d love to hear what peoples experience is of this in SDR mode on these displays (I don’t have access to an OLED).
P.S. QD-OLED displays will be fine because they have a RGB sub pixel layout.
