Sometimes the most durable memories are with the shittiest games. I’m sure you can’t find many articles around about Operation: Cleanstreets 
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I agree, the emotional link it’s pretty subjective. Some “bad” games can suck you in because of the game concept, the scenarios, sometimes even just the music.
Amiga lived in the shadow of great consoles of that age, but was able to nail some masterpieces. As a vintage gamer, I can now see cleary how many shitty games we hailed as classics because of graphic presentation or tech achievement: I mean GODS, BODY BLOWS/GALACTIC, but even AGONY itself were pretty lacking, but still loving. JIM POWER itself has mediocre gameplay but… the music? The parallax? The acid colors? It’s a charm. Sensible soccer? Cannon Fodder? Funny and minimal.
One thing I still can’t forgive: bad controls schemes. And with just one button on original amiga (and few games natively supporting 2 buttons) we had to go thru really bad choices. Fortunately with modern emulation we can map everything to the best.
Perhaps our destiny is to finally get the quality games we deserved 3 decades ago 
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I’d like to think of games as a sensorial experience, and each game being more than the sum of its parts. I love all 3 Shadow of the Beast games, Agony and Jim Powers. I will die on that hill:) They all look, sound and feel completely Amiga. And I still play them all regularly. Lionheart, First Samurai and Turrican 2 for me are quintessential amiga trio. They have that same blissful feel that consoles can’t replicate. Just that beat from the First Samurai intro…I’m almost crying. I should go back to writing on my blog:)
And could you imagine something as unique, quirky but also nasty as Moonstone on a console? It could only exist on the Amiga. The ultimate party game!
As for bad control schemes, I agree, emulation is a blessing. Turrican 1 has 2 different keyboard keys for different smart bombs. I can just map them to my Arcade Stick. Lovely
One thing is certain: we will always love her dithered makeup.
Can’t wait for the final chapter to be out!
Lovely. They butchered my Elaine in the remake.
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Heya brothers in pixels! Following experimentations with CRT shaders, I decided to release an intermediate RC to include a separate chain for slot-mask and aperture-grille.
This includes heavy modified versions of some really nice pixel shaders from the Libretro community:
Commodore displays are set to Slot-Mask. Procedural bezels make use of Aperture-grille.
Here we go with the changelog:
Mega Bezel Commodore Pack RC3.1 (May 1st, 2022)
New release for public testing, added a new pixel shader chain to customize displays CRT visuals. BONUS: squashed some minor visual bug.
Software requirements:
- RetroArch v1.9.8 with aspect ratio set to ‘full’
- HSM_Bezel_Reflection_V_0.9.106_2022-03-24_Rev_1
Features:
- Added
CRT-TECH CHAINto get pixel shaders customization according to actual IRL display technology
Enhancements:
- Added
CRT-TECH SLOT-MASK COMMODOREfor Commodore displays visuals (based off CRT-A2080-HiResSmartResShader by @Guest.R & @Rincewind) - Added
CRT-TECH APERTURE-GRILLE SHARPfor procedural bezels visuals (based off Death-to-Pixels by @Cyber)
Fixes:
- Fixed
SCALE PRESETSfor better visual coherence across curved, flat and integer (tnx @Ruysan) - Fixed
SCENE PRESETSto fix tube reflections texture (tnx @HyperSpaceMadness) - Fixed
GITHUB REPO STRUCTUREto ease out the updating process for advanced users (tnx @HyperSpaceMadness)
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Naturally, it’s your pack and this might be exactly the look you’re going for, but don’t you find the results a little too dark and contrasty? The green monster thing is quite desaturated too. I definitely liked your previous attempts better.
On the girl with the pink hair I can see some vertical moire stripes too — slot & phosphor mask pixel-width mismatch perhaps?
For reference, here are the same images with my current preset. It’s a bit different to the one from the article; @guest.r was kind enough to backport some improvements from his advanced shaders to the old WinUAE shaders, and I’ve made good use of some of those features (I’ll update the article later). I’ve increased the saturation a bit and the highlights are a lot better; now there is no luminance loss compared the raw unfiltered images whatsoever.
EDIT: One more pet peeve of mine. The Amiga is supposed to have perfectly square pixels in PAL mode; that’s what the OS reports too. That means that 320x256 would fill the screen completely vertically, but it will have very thin black bars on the two sides of the screen. You’ve stretched the 5/4 aspect ratio image to the 3/4 aspect ratio screen to remove those bars, so the image is a little bit stretched horizontally (I know some people did that in the back the day; however, it’s wrong 
). It’s quite visible if you compare the pink haired girls image of yours to mine. Anyway, I felt compelled to mention
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Yup, previous screenshots were taken in a “safe” integer scaling contex. Flat and curved presets will need masking/scanlines to be way less pronounced to prevent loss of brightness and artifacts. This has to be done at different levels of zoom for 12 different displays, so a little of tweaking is needed. After all, it’s a “pre-release” 
Thank you for your captures, these came out from WinUAE? I’ll use these as reference to better calibrate final brightness, my monitor is aging and I can’t trust it for tuning “by eye”.
This will be easily managed by unlocking the procedural bezels aspect ratio, and let them auto-adapt to the actual core resolution / aspect ratio. Letting the PUEA core manage PAL/NTSC resolution will result in correct pixels, but also produce a less-than-pleasing switching of bezels dimensions to dynamically adapt to resolutions. I don’t like that as it’s pretty disorienting and makes the experience to appear “glitchy”, so I need further investigation. Shaderlord @HyperspaceMadness will enlight my path!
On the other side, “textured displays” need a locked 1,33 aspect ratio as bezels have to stay in place with the graphical assets. I have to do some tests disabling PUAE autocentering and overscan to work with the “native” output. I like your idea to play with the original letterboxes, but this really is a game-by-game scenario. I need a more robust all-in-one solution as I don’t expect users to manage all the PAL/NTSC fuss: to make Amiga gaming more accessible, we absolutely need to develop a “consolized” experience.
Worst case, I’ll have to develop specific presets for PAL and NTSC. But I can get over it for accuracy’s sake! 
Thank you so much for your feedback @Rincewind, I really appreciate. I’m sure we can do justice to this Amiga quest!
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Yep, they’re all WinUAE screenshots.
Luckily, I have no such goal Dunno how that would work, people still need to figure out whether to play a particular game in PAL or NTSC (e.g. figure out who the developer/publisher was, European or from the US, etc… 90% of WHDLoad games are PAL, but most of them can be switched to NTSC mode to play “correctly”).
Anyway, good luck on your quest!
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PUAE core has a specific feature to auto manage PAL/NTSC switching by simply parsing a tag in the ADF/HDF filename.
I just have to complete the circle on my side 
so I’m pretty confident to get to the point, sooner or later.
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Yes, but very few of those releases are the “real” NTSC releases, tagged in the filename. Most US developed titles you can find online are the PAL versions, in fact, but you can run them in NTSC mode to get the correct aspect ratio & gameplay speed (by using the NTSC tooltype in case of WHDLoad conversions). I have a section about this in my article.
By relying on the tags, you’ll play all Cinemaware, LucasArts and SSI games in PAL aspect ratio, among many others… Many of them with the wrong music and gameplay speed.
I guess people can do the research and put the correct tag in the filename, if that’s what you meant.
Anyway, my point is, discerning users will still need manual overrides. But I’m sure most people just don’t care 
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Ahaha I do. I feel like we’re fighting against “the slings and arrows of outrageous conversions” and this is half of the fun!
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I’m very curious to check this out, but I can’t find the RC3.1 download anywhere.
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Had to update the blog too
@RuySan please report me some references/params on brightness levels for curved, flat and integer. Last time your ending result was pretty good!
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Courage et merci pour tout ce travail effectuer :cœur:
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Merci mon ami et bienvenue dans mon petit sanctuaire de jeux Commodore!
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Hi Namec! I just wanted to drop in a huge thank you for the efforts you’re going to with this pack. I was already enjoying the 3.0 version and especially love the A1000 ambient desk and Turrican poster overlay (do you have plans for anything like that for other machines?), but incorporating Rincewind’s shader work into it in the 3.1 RC has elevated my Amiga-ing to new levels. Checking out my favourite games to see what they look like now with the shader has been really exciting stuff.
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Oh! Quick question: I noticed the commodore shaders were zipped in a different folder structure to the usual: Mega_Bezel_Community_Collections rather than Mega_Bezel_Community. Should the two be used side-by-side?
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The paths are relative so it really doesn’t make a difference. You could rename the “Mega_Bezel_Community” to “Mega_Bezel_Community_Collections” to clean things up.
We have talked about many names for the folder and I believe decided on the “Mega_Bezel_Community_Collections” but not everyone (Including myself.) has taken action.
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Heya thank you @SharkaBytes for the very kind words, it’s pretty important for me to keep up the motivation to carry on the project!
Hope you can bump F8 and share some captures of you favorite Amiga games I’m pretty curious to discover new games to include in my personal Amiga playlist!
For RC 3.1 I shifted to the official Mega_Bezel_Community_Collection following @HyperspaceMadness feedback and will keep this folder in future releases.
The old Mega_Bezel_Community folder is just for RC3 and older releases, so if you plan to use the newest RC 3.1 you can of course delete it.
If you want to experiment with both, you can simply copy/paste the RC3 from Mega_Bezel_Community to Mega_Bezel_Community_Collections and delete the old folder. It will work flawlessly!
Have fun, nice things are coming!
I’ll probably use the “desk point of view” for the pc-like amigas like A2000 A3000 A4000 A3000T A4000T as these have a “frontal design” and separate keyboards, making them more recognizable.
Older amigas (and c64 and vic20) have an all-in-one “top design”, so I think the “desk point of view” together with the big central display will result in a less than satisfying framing, thought a realistic one.
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