The most accurate CRT experience possible - call to all shader pros

Yeah thanks hunterk :slight_smile:

Although Vulcan support would still be a great option in Windows :star_struck: as not all shaders play nice with D3d. And of course my enormous shader chain in the Mega Bezel is one of them :frowning:

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Do we know what is broken with D3D in the shaders? I have noticed some of the larger shaders not working.

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Not really, but I agree it seems to be more problematic on larger shaders. The problem with the Mega Bezel is an extreme one where when you load it in Vulcan or GLCore on Windows it maybe takes 10 seconds to load, but when you try to load it with D3D on Windows it is about 5 minutes or longer. I’m not sure what part of the process is lagging so much to cause this.

Here’s a link to the Mega Bezel if you haven’t seen it before:

https://forums.libretro.com/t/hsm-mega-bezel-reflection-shader-feedback-and-updates

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I have indeed seen your Mega Bezel thread - very impressive stuff indeed! Maybe I should try it on mine and use PIX to debug it but first I’m probably going to try adding HDR to Vulkan - looks relatively easy from what I’ve now seen of code snippets.

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Very cool!, I haven’t used Pix before and only a bit of RenderDoc which would show me a lot of the info about the passes, buffers random data etc.

Good luck!

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Taking a look back, this looks great! Have you given up on this project or are all the learnings from this integrated in your newer project threads and in your GitHub projects?

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I was unsure where to post until I saw this topic. The topic can be endlessly debated but I wanted to post this

This is a 1960s Vacuum Tube General Electric Shadow Dot Mask CRT running on R from somebody on Reddit

I’ve never seen Chrono Trigger look so smooth before Everytime somebody posts some trinitron or pvm with CT running on it you see the scanlines and an aliased picture far from the smooth picture from this 60s TV

I wonder if this 60s TV could be simulated with Shaders?

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I’m seeing a lot of noise in the photo and it looks a little out of focus, not to mention the compression artifacts on top of that. Are you sure it’s the TV you would like to see recreated or the noisy, out of focus photo? it’s easy to add noise and probably some halation to almost any preset and get something starting to resemble that look.

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If you are looking for a dot mask, some similar looks can be found playing with the Guest ADV base in the Mega Bezel.

Use these parameters pasted into a saved preset.

HSM_INTERLACE_TRIGGER_RES = "100.000000"
HSM_INTERLACE_MODE = "-1.000000"
m_glow = "1.000000"
glow = "1.059999"
shadowMask = "5.000000"
masksize = "0.000000"
mshift = "3.500000"
slotmask = "1.000000"
slotmask1 = "1.000000"
slotms = "0.000000"

Or save them to a *.params and use them as a local shader override in one of my presets.

I’m no expert, I’m sure others could come up with something better.

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@Cyber The noise you’re seeing is from RF input, not from image artifacts

The dude who posted the thread in reddit(LukeEvansSimon) also made the thread over at Shumps forum about modifying a CRT’s TVL.

You can see some of his comments in that reddit link I posted.

@Duimon I can still se the aliasing in your pic unlike that 60s TV

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I wasn’t even trying to come close, just showing that something like the dot mask was possible.

I’m positive that someone with more experience than me could replicate it with ease.

how’s this? It’s just GTU with no scanlines, a drop in both vertical and horizontal res and a dotmask on top:

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I can see a lot of grain in the picture. Also, you cannot even make out the phosphors clearly. So my point was that you have to be careful using such a low quality reference to try to recreate or judge something because what will you end up making? Something containing all of the flaws of the reference material and medium or something that’s accurate to what is the subject of the reference material in real life?

Are you 100% sure that the grain and noise you’re seeing is not from film grain and compression on top of any artifacts in the screen?

Is the photo in proper focus so as to represent the graphics as they would appear in person?

All of those factors can skew what you’re trying to make. So you might end up recreating a preset that resembles the photo and not necessarily the TV.

Here are two more shots from the reddit post.

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Now this is much better and something that I can work with!

This is what I’ve come up with so far. I think this is a good start.

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I never got around these, I think my setup between macOS High Sierra and RA (Metal) had some trouble running these. I might be lying, honestly in the end I ended up buying an actual 80s CRT and a HDMI>RF converter :rofl: when I eventually have to move out down the line I will look into this shader thing again.

Cyber = God

This is looking amazing. Apart from the lack of RF simulation but still, this is close to my ideal.

I’m not God at all. I appreciate the enthusiasm though. Credit must be given to the great minds behind the shaders themselves like @guest.r, @HyperspaceMadness and all others who may have contributed.

I haven’t released this in my pack as yet because I’m holding out for a few kinks to be worked out in the latest HSM Mega Bezel as well as in this particular version of CRT-GUEST-ADVANCE in order for my settings to work a bit more consistently.

NTSC effects, for example RF effects and artifacts can be added subsequently.

The preset can actually look even closer to the old TV photo version by adjusting the gamma a little lower. The further softening that you can see on some of the edges in the TV is clearly as a result of the focus limitations in the photo. You can observe this if you look at the text and other fine features.

This can probably be simulated by taking a photo of the screen while using the preset with a similarly out of focused camera.

I must say thanks for the inspiration and the challenge though.

It’s actually close to my former ideal as well because I actually started making presets to replace the original “Death To Pixels” preset for Analog Shader Pack 3.0, which was a Shadow Mask preset based on the Boob Tube.

I’ve tried to get something like that which looked good before but none have been acceptable to me until this attempt.

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Here are some follow up screenshots of my Shadow Mask preset as well as a new Composite Slot Mask NTSC preset I’ve started working on. Looking forward to sharing these with the community when everyone will be able to use them as intended.

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