Sony Megatron Colour Video Monitor

[thephonypope]

Seems most of the Game Mode defaults on the TV (if what I’m seeing after reset is what you have) involve Colour Tone as standard (which is a fairly “cool” setting), Contrast Enhancer to High, and Peak Brightness off (along with slight variations on main Colour setting). Might be interesting to play around with different variations on those.

Peak Brightness I always figured would be best left on High, and I’ve had mostly mixed results with Contrast Enhancer due to some desaturation and blow out\black crush issue - that said this was from my experimenting with standard games and movies. How emulation shaders on the TV would react by changing these could be a very different thing.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Yeah I would try to have most things in neutral/default settings as the image manipulation algorithms behind those things (especially ‘enhancers’ or ‘intelligent’ or ‘dynamic’ settings) will probably conflict with the ones in the shader.

Of course if you know exactly what they are doing and exactly what the shaders ones are doing then go for gold.

The shader ones are all done in linear space buts not to say the TVs ones arent either. Of course you could also set a lot of the shader ones to neutral too but beaware the TV wont know the shaders paper white or peak brightness settings i.e PQ transfer function its using so may or may not behave as expected.

Also say brightness on your TV will be different from the brightness in the shader as they are manipulating different things.

[thephonypope]

My understanding when it comes to screen settings would want to have the Colour Tone set to Warm 2 which is closest to 6500K temperature. That said I’m hearing that Japan was using a 9300K standard when making a lot of these older games, so perhaps it could be argued that a lot of retro content should be played on Standard (which will have another benefit in slightly brightening the image)? In either case Contrast Enhancer likely set to off if trying to achieve a neutral config.

Peak Brightness is a little bit harder to nail down since on one hand it will unlock how bright the screen will be allowed to get, which is probably what we’d want from HDR mode in this instance, but according to Rtings “it (also) adjusts the Automatic Brightness Limiter, or ABL, which limits the brightness of the display depending on the content shown, which can be distracting at times”. I’m thinking High would be the ideal to achieve highest peak brightness but would want to test more before saying anything definitive.

Have a friend who has a lot of recent CRT experience coming over to try some of these out. Think I’ve solved all my main issues though and it’s just down to some relatively minor tweaking at this point for me. Thanks again for the help!

[MajorPainTheCactus]

The shader has the correct way to set the 9300K - set the shader into NTSC-J mode. Itll do the correct colour transforms to rec 2020 from rec 601 as well.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Ill be very interested to hear about your ABL findings. My theory is that ABL shouldnt kick in really for this shader as its based on power consumption of the TV. As basically most of the sub pixels are turned off 75% by the mask and another large percentage of those remaining by the scanlines I reckon youre looking at 10-20% power consumption at peak brightness.

[thephonypope]

Yeah I don’t think ABL will be an issue here, have put it through the motions in RA without seeing any changes myself.

So on the TV side that leaves a couple things such as Contrast Enhancer which raises the EOTF curve making everything brighter than it normally should be. It can raise black to grey in some cases that I’ve seen in movies, and can compresses dynamic range too but not sure how the EOTF curve relates to what this shader is doing. That reminds me of another setting Game HDR - having it on disables Dynamic Tone Mapping (in firmware 13xx anyway). It’s supposed to be HGIG but there is some form of static tone mapping still in play it seems.

Whenever I’ve been tinkering with these settings it’s changing what I feel my Paper White setting should be on the shader side.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Yeah so the best thing to do with all of this is to get the 240p test suite and run it through the various test patterns - mainly the various gradients starting with the white to black gradients and make sure you can see the very dark and very bright bars.

With respect to EOTFs the shader does that according to the various specs be that rec 709, sRGB, P3 or rec 2020 and they will interact with the inverse tonemapper youre tweaking via paper white and peak brightness. Id probably turn off all that on your tv whilst using this shader as the shader is more spcialised for this scenario but again if you know what you are doing you should be able to get anything working.

[Jamirus]

Are the shadow masks (i.e. mask setting 1.0) somehow differently working as the other two? On my 1200p monitor I can make use of aperture grille with three different settings: 1080p 300/600TVL + 4k 800 TVL. With shadow mask, it seems 4k 800 TVL is the same as1080p 600 TVL?

[thephonypope]

Getting a little in the weeds where I’m talking more about the TV settings than the shader, but just as a quick follow up I found that Contrast Enhancer, while providing really nice “pop” in some circumstances especially with white text, over brightened certain near-dark colours in distracting ways. Easiest example to demonstrate this that I found was in Link to the Past - Link’s shadow and many other dark spaces are tinted very subtly green, but turning contrast enhancer on High blows this up and makes a lot of things seem a little more green than they should be.

Here’s a close of up Link to demonstrate how his shadow’s green characteristics are more vibrant with this turned on. His face and arm looks a little oversaturated as well. I’ll try and find some other adjustments that can give me a bit more of that bright blooming blinding white I remember from CRTs without messing up the colour so much.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Ah yes - Ive been meaning to fill out the shadow masks correctly. Good point! Although having said that Im limited in what TVL targets I can support as unlike with aperture grille and slot masks the dot pattern isnt easily manipulated given the amount of pixels we have to play with. Ill re-evaluate what I have and dont have and try and find time to fix them up as best I can/is possible.

[MajorPainTheCactus]

The photos are really useful but is there a way to get them more in focus? Its a little difficult to see whats going on. I notice the left handside of the images is much more in focus. My android phone has a ‘pro’ mode on it which helps me but not sure if its available on all phones.

[Nesguy]

Looks like you have other issues, too. Why are the whites red yellow cyan blue purple? Is this an OLED?

[Cyber]

@Nesguy

Why are the whites red yellow cyan blue purple? Is this an OLED?

That could be due to the camera/photography. I’ve noticed that when trying to take photos of my screen as well depending on the focal distance and focus settings. The colours never look like that in person though.

[thephonypope]

EDIT: Going to readd a couple images, forgot I had a blargg filter on which made it harder to see. The greener picture is the one with CE on

It’s something that seemed fairly obvious as I went through the early game since so many semi- dark things are interpreted as green when you throw off the HDR EOTF curve on the TV. Probably easier to see in person than in these rather poor pics.

But anyhoo, moral of the story is to probably keep CE off on the S95b, though you probably figured that already. I did definitely like how it made the white text look though, that said.

Also yes this is a QD OLED

[MajorPainTheCactus]

Yeah I quite like the one with CE on TBH but I quite like bright saturated colours rather than accuracy which is probably why I chose to have Saturation up high on the default preset. You should try the 2730QM preset it should have more accurate colours.

[thephonypope]

Yeah totally agree there are elements of CE that really make it tempting when it comes to emulation, it’s less of a trade off compared to using it with other types of content from what I’ve been able to tell and it helps create a bit more intensity, and more of that effect of colours from one phosphor bleeding into another.

White text is where I noticed it most and it was quite nice, got a little bit of that blinding feel from the opening text in Super Metroid.

Just when it comes to colour accuracy there might be some issues. Not sure yet how much of that would really be noticeable, or would be edge cases. Think it’s somewhat subjective and based on ones sensitivity to some of the changes it might make.

[Cyber]

@thephonypope

forgot I had a blargg filter on which made it harder to see.

Ahhh…I see you use Blargg Filters. Have you seen or tried my Blargg_SNES_Custom_Psuedo_XXXX_NTSC presets? I have some newer ones in my Shader Preset Pack thread.

[thephonypope]

Yeah! If you made those thanks, they’re definitely well done. Have found the Blargg NTSC SNES Custom pseudo PCE PSX SNES S-VIDEO was an easy one to throw on while I’m trying to nail down all my settings, it’s perfectly subtle an effective for what I’m looking for

I’ll look into that thread you mentioned as well. I’m definitely wanting to find combinations and adjustments that will display Dracula’s eyes nicely in SotN

[Cyber]

@thephonypope

display Dracula’s eyes nicely in SotN

That shouldn’t be too difficult. I have NTSC presets which can do that using GDV-NTSC via HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader. You can try the same settings in the Sony Megatron Color Video Monitor preset that integrates the GDV NTSC shader.

CyberLab_PSX_Composite_Slot_Mask_IV_OLED_NTSC.slangp

CyberLab_PSX_Composite_Slot_Mask_IV_OLED_NTSC.slangp (Le’Sarsh)

CyberLab_PSX_S-Video_Slot_Mask_IV_OLED_NTSC.slangp

[thephonypope]

You just saved me a ton of time, much obliged. Also have a friend who has sworn by CRTs recently started considering straying to the dark side, he’ll also be very interested! I’ll definitely be sending these his way.