Yes! People have been saying that.
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Rename is done! 
See top/first post for videos and a bit of tongue in cheek fun.
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Nice!
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Just to take stock of what the shader can currently do:
-Pro-grade aperture grille
-consumer-grade aperture grille (just use the 8K mask at 4K)
-Pro-grade slot mask
-High-res dot mask
What’s still missing:
-consumer-grade slot mask (most common mask used in TVs, only mask used by arcade CRTs)
-low-res dot mask (used by early computer monitors)
-color grading stuff
Further down the road?
-composite video signal stuff
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How does black light strobing compare to software based black frame insertion at 120Hz? I remember the software based BFI used to be better for some reason, but that was years ago.
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Hi @Nesguy so I thought I’d just focus on what’s missing.
So I’ve added a whole load of colour grading stuff - input colour systems, output colour spaces, phosphors, contrast, brightness, saturation, temperature. I want to add tint. I dont see the benefit of hue. What would you like to see/think is missing?
What do you mean by consumer-grade slot mask? The mask I’ve got seems to match all the ones in my local arcades although I could be missing something.
I do have low res for mask - I think the Toshiba preset is currently set to use it (not that it should). But it may not be what you are after.
We can do anything you want supported basically. Currently I’m doing an optimisation pass as the colour grading stuff has made things SLOW (still faster than most shaders but not as fast as it was).
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I can’t imagine software based BFI being better than blacklight strobing as you just don’t have the control that the monitor has. Blur busters implemented the backlight strobing on the Eve Spectrum and gives different strobe lengths and a custom app to tweak it. As I understand it, it’s far closer to how a CRT refreshes the screen than bluntly adding a whole black frame. Blur busters say they think the they’ve achieved Plasma level blur reduction. I’ll get a video to show you and you can hopefully judge for yourself to some degree.
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I actually haven’t taken a look at the latest, but sounds like you’ve done a good job here.
The slot mask photos I’ve seen thus far are of a medium-high TVL slot mask monitor, most likely a 31kHz monitor that’s designed to handle multiple resolutions and such.
A typical 15kHz arcade monitor or TV is lower res than this, it has maybe 1-2 triads per picture line as opposed to 2-3,.
Are most of the machines at your arcade of the candy cab variety, by chance?
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Ok yes I think we’re in luck as I think I’ve done that already (I think) - the user just needs to up the display resolution to 8K and it will use that mask (for 4K screens it has the effect of halving the effective resolution). I’m going to add 300TVL option for this though as it’s a bit more obvious/explicit.
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Currently I’m doing an optimisation pass as the colour grading stuff has made things SLOW (still faster than most shaders but not as fast as it was).
And how! My PC running Lakka using an Intel HD 630 used to be able to run this shader at full speed, but after the recent updates, it is now insanely slow. We’re talking one frame a second, or less!
Now, I can’t really use this shader as intended because the HD 630 only supports 4K at 30 Hz and doesn’t support HDR (even when it ran at full speed, it looked wrong due to lack of HDR support, so there was no point in using it), so maybe take this with a grain of salt, but still. It can handle guest-advanced-fastest just fine, but this shader completely obliterates it now. Even running it at 1080p does no good. On the other hand, my Windows laptop’s Quadro K1100M handles it just fine (albeit at 1080p, haven’t tried it at 4K), but I’m not really surprised by this.
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Hmm, if it’s going that slow, there’s probably something wrong beyond just needing some optimization. GPU drivers can be weird sometimes, freaking out on a specific function or whatever, and it sounds like there might be something like that going on here.
EDIT: I just loaded the shader for the first time, now that SDR is on there and it looks great, obviously, but much too dark (and the res is much too low) on my ancient Haswell 720p laptop lol.
However, I had to change all of the ‘include’ paths to use fwd-slash instead of the Windows-style backslash to get the shader paths to resolve. Just FYI 
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Yeah, I’m thinking driver issue as well. No way should it be running THIS slow. I updated to the latest Lakka version which incorporated Mesa updates, and it made no difference. Something weird is definitely going on.
For what it’s worth, the PVM 20L4 preset using the 1000 TVL mask looks damn good at 1080p on my monitor (although really, it’s more like 500 TVL at that resolution). A bit dark, but very freaking accurate regardless.
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My laptop with hd630 and GTX 1060 when running windows, hd630 runs all shaders much faster (like able to handle guest-advanced-fast at least), but when running Linux mint it runs much slower, Linux mint reports it as hd630(power saving mode). So it could be that driver switched the card to low speeds to save battery. Didn’t find any option to change speed as it runs the default (open source?) driver. Of course if I switch Linux to GTX 1060 with Nvidia drivers, everything runs perfect.
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After becoming the Elden Lord I’ve had time to try out the new improvements to the shader. The SDR mode gives a much more saturation on my qn90a but still has a dullness to the image. I wonder if it’s a Samsung issue and how their local dimming works.
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No need to worry it’s back faster than guest fastest now - it’ll hopefully close in on crt-fast or whatever its called. I’ve also made a change to RetroArch itself to skip the copy at the end of frame when using HDR. Bear with me today as I’ve got a few more things to do but all is in hand on the optimisation front.
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Ah good to know I’ll change that now! Yes also to the driver thing. The shader is currently a smidgen faster than guest venom stock and about three times faster than crt-royale-kuzomi - the optimised version is a good deal faster than that which I’ll submit shortly.
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I’ve just done my first pass on performance as I noticed the Sony Megatron had slowed right down after adding colour grading as pretty much expected. I measured it at 0.4ms on a 3080Ti obviously this is not a problem in any case but I’m really interested in getting this working at 4K on a Pi4 at 60fps in SDR mode which I will come to.
All are profiled in the same scene of Snes9X (Current): Legend of Zelda in the opening room using Nvidia NSight 2021.3.1 on a 3080Ti at 4K.
So here’s the list of shaders/presets I’ve profiled (just out of curiosity) in ascending order of speed in SDR mode (The Sony Megatron is by far the fastest in HDR as it doesn’t have the additional overhead of the HDR shader/copy):
crt/crt-geom-deluxe.slangp: 2.36ms
presets/crt-royale-kurozumi.slangp: 1.05ms
crt/crt-royale.slangp: 0.99ms
crt-guest-advanced-2022-01-07-release1/crt-guest-advanced.slangp: 0.87ms
crt/crt-geom.slangp: 0.68ms
presets/crt-guest-dr-venom-stock.slangp: 0.63ms
crt/crt-lottes-fast.slangp: 0.37ms
crt-guest-advanced-2022-01-07-release1/crt-guest-advanced-fastest.slangp: 0.33ms
crt-easymode.slangp: 0.27ms
hdr/crt-sony-megatron-sony-pvm-2730.slangp: 0.19ms
crt/zfast-crt-hdmask.slangp: 0.10ms
Let me know any more you want me to profile!
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Its really strange as that display should be a match made in heaven for this shader. It does sound something TV side if SDR mode isn’t working that well - you’ve got brightness turned all the way up btw?
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Yeah I’m a bit disappointed as I’ve been saying that this is THE TV to get for CRT shaders (mostly due to its SDR sustained maximum brightness). The way TVs are tested doesn’t account for everything that can happen with CRT shaders, though. The scanlines/mask might be triggering ABL, could be the local dimming… who knows.
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I did some comparison with Guest Venom having the mask at 100% vs Megatron and Guest gives me brighter results. Megatron gives me razor sharp RGB lines for individual phosphor emulation while Guest, with all the sharpening set to max, has bleed into the the surrounding pixels giving the impression of fatter RGB dots. 1000TVL on Megatron becomes bright but I have almost no mask at that point.
My guess is that is that my TV wants fatter pixels to reach it’s peak brightness.
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