TheNamec - Mega Bezel Packs Amiga, Commodore 64, VIC20, CRTgaming soon

Yep! That’s the idea!!

I play on an OLED TV so something like that might completely blend into the background at night when the room is dark leaving just the monitor and it’s contents on my TV Stand! Perfect!!

By the way what shader preset are you using in that picture? It looks good! I also like that the curvature is at an extreme minimum. Is it even on in that picture?

I’m not completely against curvature, it’s just that I haven’t really seen the illusion done correctly to convey that the image is on a curved screen in the way that it looks on an actual curved CRT. Everything so far just warps the images in very inauthentic ways in my opinion and causes severe distraction especially when games are scrolling. I don’t remember Mario or Sonic looking like they were running around in a fishbowl. I remember the screens might have been curved but horizontal lines didn’t bend upward or downward at either end and vertical lines didn’t bend inward at the ends either like in a pin cushion. Sets probably came factory calibrated to reduce any type of pin cushioning and some allowed you to further fine tune the geometry to get things as straight as possible.

Actually, consumer color CRT TVs didn’t have scanlines, or really any type of visible mask, until the very late days of CRT TVs.

If you got really close you could see the sub pixels, especially if the divergence was in need of calibration.

My father was a TV repairman. I saw GE, Magnavox, RCA, and Zenith, but in all my youth I never saw a Trinitron. ( Smaller TVs were brands like Craig, Goldstar, Philco, Philips, and eventually SONY.)

The first time a saw a Trinitron was a PC CRT in the 90’s and the first BVM I saw was a SONY in 1998-ish. (Many years after my father had moved on to repairing other electronics. Solid State circuitry completely changed the TV repair business, board level repair just wasn’t done anymore.)

From my perspective, CRT enthusiasts that call their toys “Vintage”, is a bit like seeing a vintage cell phone for sale on Ebay. :grin:

This is the main reason I chose the RCA and HMV as my two vintage TV graphics. (All the existing generic TV overlays were based on much newer TVs.)

I don’t want to sound harsh, but I think us supplying presets is maybe doing the Mega Bezel a kind of disservice. Consumers (The users who download our presets.) are not learning that it is a simple matter of changing a single line of text in a preset to use your favorite background.

Turn on night mode and they will blend together rather well even if they weren’t developed as a set.

Our presets are not the shader, they are just us taking advantage of it’s features. Often, on Discord, I see people referring to the Mega Bezel as “Duimon’s shaders”, not “Duimon’s presets”. :frowning_face:

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The horizontal and vertical lines I’m referrerring to are the lines and shapes in the source material like a line or rectangular area in the graphics or on whatever object was in the picture. I don’t remember them being bent in the X or Y axes.

What about your recollection of rectangular shapes, lines and objects?

Then there’s that whole fishbowl effect during scrolling that the artificial curvature induces. I never noticed that happening when playing on a CRT and I have an old CRT monitor that I’m sure if I hook up now, it wouldn’t look like that. I think I’ll hook it up one of these days just to make sure I’m not deluding myself.

As for scanlines and visible masks. I really don’t remember noticing those things on my 14 (or was it 15”) Commodore 1702 and most small 13 or 14|" or even 20” TVs, I can remember noticing these things on larger displays like 27 and 32" sets and I used to feel as though my small monitor had a higher resolution because of it.

I used to get scolded for sitting too close to the TV and usually played games from very close up. I eventually outgrew that when I was a teen but I was fascinated by the RGB subpixel arrangement. I didn’t understand how all those elements could be red blue and green, yet the image was not.

Well what might be second nature to us might be a lot more of a challenge to others. Some might be knowledgeable and familiar in some areas but unfamiliar in others. It all depends on one’s focus at the time. I like making these techie stuff as accessible as possible so that more can enjoy and share in what makes me happy.

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I really don’t want to belabor the issue but I was intentionally referencing vintage TVs in my dialog.

Here is a video of Mario 64 on a 1973 RCA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwt10u16R0g

One hell of a lot of distortion going on. :grin:

Yeah that was kind of my point with the cell phone reference :grin: any CRT monitor is going to be much newer than a vintage TV. How many 1973 CRT monitors are there floating around. :wink:

Every consumer computer was solid state. I remember many times, helping my father fish through a box of vacuum tubes, trying to find a compatible replacement from the conversion catalog.

I also remember bridging broken trace on old single layer TV PCBs.

One of the features of the Mega Bezel is independent curvature. Using this you can retain curvature for the bezel but eliminate it for the screen.

@HyperspaceMadness really does try think of all possible scenarios.

@TheNamec I am really excited about this BVM/PVM shader settings thing. I am sure that @guest.r and his contemporaries were thinking along these lines with the various masks. Maybe we could enlist their cooperation?

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Well “old” is relative and contextual. That monitor was never one that I would have been referring to from my memories or accounts. It was actually a giveaway from a customer of mine that I used to use when doing PC repairs exclisively. The monitor that I usually refer to is an old Commodore 1702, from circa 1985. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s so sets of those eras would be what I was used to. My neighbour had a huge Zenith I think that looked like it could have come from the 70’s though.

I’m aware of this. I’m cool with the perfect screen and bezel geometry of the curvature off setting though. If I were to use this setting, I’d probably have to zoom the screen in and crop off all of the overscan and hopefully not too much of the content in the process but I’m not obsessed with getting things to look as vintage as possible. I don’t mind a hybrid approach, where modern technology is embraced to have something that is probably just as good if not better than the old CRTs in some ways in terms of overall presentation.

Don’t want to nitpick here and I’m definitely not a physicist but perhaps this isn’t the best example to illustrate this point about distortion. I say this because of the perspective of the camera. It’s being filmed from an angle way above the screen and that may actually be exaggerating and inducing further distortion in the geometry. You can see this if you observe the curvature of the top and compare it to the bottom of the screen. The bottom appears more curved than the top as far as I can tell. A fairer choice might have been one with the camera dead on center of the screen. Perhaps the curvature might have appeared more in the Z axis as a result instead of in the X and Y axes. What do you think?

Yes he is a boss!..and you, @TheNamec, @Orionsangel, @Nesguy, @solid12345 and @guest.r too of course! And so are all the other contributors to this scene and RetroArch in general! A multitude of talents and disciplines all coming together to make something great! I salute and thank you all! I don’t know if you can understand how happy I am and how much it means to me to play my games using this HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader together with my presets. Words alone can hardly describe the feeling!

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Wow, lots of things to talk about!

It’s my ADVANCED custom preset, nice visible pixels with a little smooth to blend it all together. Curvature is a 2D fake cylinder, to mimic those high performance PVM/BVM, I used to set higher values for older Commodore Displays.

My general idea is to enhance the visual while “suggesting” some of the best aspects of CRT displays. Clearly, this means we don’t have to suffer the limitations of old hardware, we just have to mix the best of it for a modernized experience. In fact, I don’t design 1:1 bezels, I try to get the right amount of gameplay area while keeping nice bezels in the viewport. Testing & Composing is a precise step in my workflow and requires lots of adjustements of the vector drawing. But hey, I’m getting faster and faster at it!

Ahaha, you’ll make mr. @soqueroeu proud! We discussed about it in the past, it’s a philosophy of design: I’ve always been a ‘desktop’ gamer, meaning I’m more used to have a bigger monitor close to my face, while @soqueroeu captured the ‘couch’ gamer visual, with smaller display and some furniture.But while I love it and appreciate its complex composition, I think it sacrifices too much of the gameplay area.

So I will come up with my own ‘Retrowalls Project’ (provisional name) to make at least the display fully visible, with some original solution for unobstrusive, eye-friendly backgrouds. It’s been in the working for months, the capture with the dark background I posted is a part of it (it’s called ‘dark stucco’ preset). So… expect surprises in the future.

Problem is: thanks to @guest.r and @HyperspaceMadness (and countless shaders contributors) we may try to implement many kinds of grills/masks, scanlines and artifacts in post-processing but… will it be enjoyable? Will it even be VISIBLE, taking account of LCD/OLED tecnology we use to reproduce it? Were we really playing so close to displays as kids to appreciate every single bloomy pixel? I don’t think so.

What I’m doing here is trying to create suggestion, respect original artists vision, not just making a scanline museum! :innocent: But I have to take lessons from real hardware, to perfect the layers of my own visual language.

I believe this is our next quest along the road for defining a nice base for our presets. I’ve been taking some beating on Reddit for my presets pretending to be too much ‘retro’ with unnecessary effects… hence the idea to come closer to real PVM/BVM with the help of people who actually owns (and properly set up) the displays. We’ll need as much help as we can get!

It’s a pretty exciting ride, considering we came from much different professional roots, sensibilities and experiences, from all over the world. We all have fun giving our contribute, extending our limits and aiming higher. I started less than a year ago with my personal Amiga500 presets, now I have parallel projects interleaving and I’m part of an exquisite team of lovely retro-experiences builders.

I’m proud of it. :sob: :sunglasses:

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I see you quoted this statement I made about lines and shapes then proceeded to speak about scanlines, grills/masks and artifacts. I hope my statement wasn’t misunderstood as I was referring to graphics from a game or an object in a game or show not appearing geometrically distorted despite being displayed on a curved screen.

I’m in agreement with your idea of enhancing the visual while “suggesting” some of the best aspects of CRT displays. I’ve said that I’m after a CRT-like experience (in my presets) and definitely not aiming for a simulation of any specific type of screen or model.

Again I agree with and support this.

I don’t think you should pay too much attention to what people think of your presets to the point where you feel the need to change them to suit others’ tastes. You should have your own vision and goals that might be influenced by others and evolve over time but it should never be that you’re trying to please others. What about you? Doesn’t your vision count? Don’t accept what you like any less because it may not be what you think the majority likes or even a vocal or authoritative minority. Let “you” shine through in any and everything you do.

While this is true it seems like the more @Duimon speaks its the more I realize we have a lot in common. I also have memories with my dad fixing stuff. He used a crude old soldering iron but enough of that still rubbed off on me to spark an interest in electronics repair. I have repaired cracked amp boards using jumper wires in the past and right now I’m replacing a trace on a laptop motherboard. Hopefully it won’t all come apart when I try to resolder the LQFP chip back in place.

Keep up the excellent work and the enthusiasm! It is appreciated. Love the YouTube channel touch! @Orionsangel 's own is awesome as well! I forgot to mention @soqueroeu in my earlier salute, another boss as well! I’ve switched back and forth between being a couch and desktop gamer and now I’m a sort of hybrid - A Home Theater PC gamer!

By the way, this is on the HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader to-do list. Just thought I’d mention that in case you didn’t realize.

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It’s fine, I took the argument of “distortion effect” to the “excess of CRT effects in post-processing” :+1:

Ahah my vision is in every bit. But to avoid my design being just pure cosmetic , I have to take care of feedback, elaborate on it and try to come up with some innovation. In some way, this Libretro thread is my ‘safe house’: nice people, even nicer team to confront with… but “in the wild” there’s real criticism, and you’d be surprised how many good ideas (and consolidated processes) can come up after a bad argument.

After all, we’re creative minds!

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THE FIRST-BORN: AMIGA 1000

Following the discussion on Libretro thread, I decided to test some ‘ambient’ solutions with the Amiga 1000.

My tipical design for the background layer is a top-down view: many beloved Commodore machines have embedded keyboards (A500, A600, A1200) and top loaders (ACD32) so all of the interesting elements are seen from a top perspective!

This is not the case for some of the PC-like models with a frontal customizable plauqe and detached keyboard (A1000, A2000, A3000, A4000) so I preferred to avoid these, for design reasons and for their minor resonance (and diffusion) in the gaming fanbase.

Well, until now.

Of course I had to go creative to fill the gaps in the sides, but I think the final result is quite nice and works well with the horizontal responsive feature. This design also includes the external A1010 floppy disk drive, as it was the perfect match for the Amiga 1000 (in fact they were interchangeable).

Some IRL photos for reference

Coming soon in RC3 :wink:

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The most shameless and desired clone. Enter Giana Sisters Special Edition!

Here’s a gameplay of The Great Giana Sisters Special Edition AGA rebuild on Retroarch overlay Amiga 1200 + Commodore C1084S-D1 from TheNamec Mega Bezel Commodore Pack. Featuring Death to Pixels Arcade Sharp post-processing by @Cyber lab.

In the late eighties, if you were a gamer you had two paths you could go by: to be a console couch gamer or to steal your parents PC to have some fun! At that time, lot of console ports come to Amiga, but Nintendo games were undoubtedly a prohibited dream.

It was 1986. Manfred Trenz, the future father of Turrican, became involved in a project without precedents: a clone of Super Mario Bros so shameless and so desired by people that it could be a nice commercial idea. Problem being that Rainbow Arts team went too far with “inspiration” to the “reference materiale” and copied not only gameplay principles, but even graphics and level design!

With a memorable original soundtrack by master Chris Huelsbeck, a legendary (never happened) lawsuit by Nintendo and 36 levels of twisted dreams, The Great Giana Sisters was success on both Commodore 64 and Amiga, despite being quickly retired from stores. Of course, Giana Sisters Amiga port deserved better graphics but because of its troubled history we’re lucky it was actually released!

In 2018 Pixelglass Games updated the game hacking in new content from the DS remake, resulting in a really nice unofficial remake with new graphics and sfx, a shiny AGA intro, the same old floaty physics and still no run button (if you are wondering about it).

The Great Giana Sisters Special Edition AGA unofficial remake is free to play.

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I can’t wait to try this!:grin:

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This looks amazing! Great job :slight_smile:

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The combination of @TheNamec 's MB graphics along with these cool games such as Rygar and now Giana Sisters has really piqued my interest in checking into more Amiga games. Never really gave them much look before.

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Thanks very much for giving me this opportunity to become even more involved in this aspect of retro gaming and preservation! This is a moment for me that is filled with great pride and gratitude! I hope going forward to be able to continue improving and developing my presets to cover even more usage scenarios so that they may be accessible to all who share our appreciation for these things.

I would also like if users could be able to see these presets in their best light especially for their first impression so that that same excitement and feeling of nostalgia can be evoked in them as it was in us from my screenshots and video clips. Hopefully there can be a simple solution to the scaling and sharpness issues. Maybe we can borrow something from your presets and integrate it in order to arrive at a solution that also excels even when non-integer vertical scaling is used.

I’m sure you saw my new 1080p optimized presets. Were you able to integrate and use those instead of the older ones before creating your latest release and video or is that using the original ones with just the preliminary changes we were discussing yesterday? Also, can you test and tell me if my new 1080p Edition optimized presets look as sharp as in my screenshots when integrated with your bezel presets or if they suffer from the same non-integer scaling issues as the unoptimized ones?

That 1702 looks superb though, while that C64 brings back some very fond memories of having a book of games written in basic and having the code dictated line by line while I typed out the code for hours only to be completely underwhelmed by the games in the end!

Long live the C64/1702/1541!! Keep up the great work!

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Integration went really fine, once I understood the reference chain! I updated with the latest release (November, 6th) and photos/video in the Giana Sisters post came from there, with the exception of C64 capture that uses my own STANDARD profile.

I did some tests with non-integer and integer scaling. Of couse, as @HyperspaceMadness stated, using integer results in cleaner results (and smaller gameplay area).

So I went on and did a procedural mega bezel preset (no device textures) with integer scaling active on both axes, with the idea to let it free to adapt to the game native resolution and get the best out in basically every scenario. I started piledriving with Haggar a deep auditing routine : it felt good, the mask was sharp and the sprites were smooth. :partying_face:

Then I went on with PUAE core games… and there was a disaster because of continuous dynamic resolution changes, autocropping and autocentering. In particularly hacky games from a technical point of view (Agony, Jim Power) I couldn’t find a setting to make it even output the correct aspect ratio! Switching off these core features would require manual adjusting for each game, so for the moment I have to get back to ‘locked’ 4:3 1.33 AR non-integer solution. :unamused:

But I promise, as soon as I overcome the shock, I’ll do some more tests to try to increase the clearness of my pixels.

@HyperspaceMadness rounded values for scaling may influence the aliasing? Like using “78.000000” instead of “78.200000”. What about even/uneven values? Feels like I’m re-living some Macromedia Flash subpixel aliasing nightmare… :japanese_goblin:

Long live Commmodore :sob:

(Except for the Amiga 4000, that was really overpriced.)

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Do you mean aliasing on the monitor graphics?

Exact percentages don’t really mean anything except as a measure of the game image height relative to the full viewport height. Everything else will be relative.

For example the default non-integer scale is 83.xxx which is just what it needed to be for a 224p game to have a vertical integer scale at 1080p.

The aliasing in graphics as they are scaled down is related to the fact that I can’t properly use mip-mapping for the graphics due to the bug where the resolution of the original textures is not reported by retroarch in Vulkan and GLCore. :anguished:

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[(224x4)/83]*100 = 1079 :exploding_head:

So taking calculating non-integer scale for Amiga basic resolutions:

  • PAL 320x240 -> [(240x4)*100]/1080 -> non-integer scale for PAL is 88.888888 %
  • NTSC 320x200-> [(200x4)*100]/1080 -> non-integer scale for NTSC is 74.074074 %

I’m quite close to the 74% value in my current presets… but 89%? is way too big!

This will be a major hit for visual quality when they fix. Nowadays, I’m relying on Pixel Perfect positioning while avoiding micro-details and small text :+1:

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I’m glad to hear that at least things were represented in their best possible light. I looked at the video and it was great!

Wow! That sounds like not fun! Seems like my presets are taking your bezel presets out of their comfort zone and vice versa. Good thing we talked.

I may not have bothered to make 1080p and (soon to be uploaded) 1440p optimized presets if we didn’t! While the 1080p presets can actually work well and look sharp at 1440p, certain settings vary quite a bit according to the resolution so the solution that would best preserve my vision and also help 1440p users encroach even more on 4K image quality would be dedicated optimized presets for 1440p resolution. After doing the 1080p groundwork, this wasn’t difficult at all to implement. Look out for them soon!

Perhaps this post by @Duimon might assist you in addressing some of your scaling challenges.

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Jim Power in Mutant Planet is a 200 toxic palette colors marvel with full overscan on ECS

Here’s a gameplay of Jim Power in Mutant Planet on Retroarch overlay Amiga 1000 + Commodore C1080 from TheNamec Mega Bezel Commodore Pack. Featuring Death to Pixels Arcade Sharp post-processing by Cyberlab.

Jim Power is a technological marvel from assembly wizard Fernando Velez. Its toxic palette, 200 vivid colors on screen at the same time, complex parallax effects and unforgettable Chris Huelsbeck soundtrack made this one of my favourite run-and-gun and one of my fondest Amiga memories. Borrowing the best elements from Turrican, Ghost 'n Goblins, Contra (platform sections) and R-Type (shoot 'em up sections), Jim Power throws the player through painstakingly long levels, up to six minutes each.

The first Amiga backdrop for Mega Bezel Commodore Pack in 2020.

Of course, the game cames with dumb scripted enemies and straight-forward gameplay based upon traps, timed jumping and muscolar memory. Inconsistent art direction offers soldiers from ancient Rome lost between Japanese houses and werewolves, forests with dragons, zombies, archers from the Robin Hood gang and demons with giant ants but… hey! It’s a mutant planet in the 90s, it’s pretty normal.

Monochromatic love on c1201, for all these fluo palette haters out there!

Jim Power has had a long legacy, spawning conversions that felt more like remakes than direct ports: the SNES edition in particular added new levels, new music, a new design for the hero, Mode7 and motion sick parallax, changing the ‘Mutant Planet’ for a ‘Lost Dimension’. The PC Engine saw the addition of a 3’45" intro and CD quality remaster of the excellent soundtrack.

Every version added something good, but the Amiga version stays on top.

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Nice. I really need to get some of these games your showing into my collection. They are as brilliant on the Amiga as the DOS shareware was on the PC.

Really nice job on the 1000, I love the perspective and shading!

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