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.
I checked the Near_curved, and the brightness is much better, but I found that the colour balance is worse. It looks a bit dull and with a yellow tint. For example, here’s the Turrican II loading screen.
I’m not seeing what you describe at all when I compare the 3 screenshots. I’m noticing the brightness and contrast improvement in the first screenshot but not noticing any dullness nor tint issues. If anything the old screenshot is more dull and dim.
It could be a mask layout issue. Try toggling the Mask Layout and see if the other option looks better.
Of course crt-masking kills brightness, I’m having an hard time finding the right amount of POST-BR as my qled monitor tends to be really bright, yet old. Scanlines/mask impact mitigation is posing quite a challenge to me! That’s why every feedback ends up being preciuos.
As I’m testing some tricks to make colors closer to the real CRT counterpart, I’m getting more and more distant from HSM Mega Bezel standard profile. That’s a fact, and it comes down to tastes and habits, color-temperature alone makes a terrible impact on general image quality, yet some people loves warmer ranges (killing blacks) more than colder ones (impacting whites). I’m exploring to find an equilibrium.
But hey, thanks to some new feature under the hood, I’ll be able re-introduce the “vanilla” Mega Bezel flavour next to these CRT experimentations. I’m not that mad at accuracy at all costs, after all.
Based on my reading and also from inputs by @Nesguy I’ve reverted to much more neutral colour settings in almost all of my presets. i.e. No Hue, no colour temperature, no Gamma_C and no CRT Phosphor Gamut adjustments - (0). I’ve also set my colour space to sRGB.
The only settings I’ve been adjusting recently with respect to colour and brightness are CRT Gamma In, CRT Gamma Out, Post CRT Brightness and Saturation.
A little bit of Bloom and a tiny amount of Halation can also have a rather profound effect on brightness. There’s also the Mask Gamma setting too.
Mask Layout, Mask Type and Mask Size can also affect colour and brightness output significantly. The way they appear on a users display can vary depending on the combination of resolution and how the mask effect align with the diaplay’s subpixels.
Since my presets are what I use, I calibrate them to suit the way my displays are calibrated. You can probably do that as well and just advise your users of some of the ways in which they can fine tune things to their liking or to suit their particular setups.
For this reason, my 1080p Optimized Presets now have the opposite Mask Layout as my 4K Optimized Presets. This is what matches my secondary 1080p TV. I have included a note advising users to adjust the mask layout to that which suits their particular display and what symptoms to look for.
Also thanks to suggestions by @Nesguy, I tested Mask 13 (RRGGBBx) on my 4K TV and there definitely was an improvement over the Mask 6 (RGB) that I currently use in most of my presets, however due to the fact that my TV doesn’t support RGB Full 4:4:4 at 4K60Hz, I can’t use Mask 13.
That doesn’t mean that users of my preset pack who’s displays can do RGB Full 4:4:4 at 4K60 shouldn’t be able to experience the benefits that Mask 13 has over Mask 6 on 4K displays, so I’ve also included a note to address this.
Remember if you reduce CRT Gamma In/Out, you can gain headroom to adjust CRT Brightness, so don’t be afraid to crank it up if you’ve already lowered the CRT Gamma In/Out.
Also when you’ve almost got it to where you want it but maybe not quite, you can try to adjust it in smaller increments as they would make a difference.
How does the brightness of these videos look on your TV?
i just tried your shader on linux & i found out that the Res folder should be renamed to res linux is case sensitive so you can have Res & res in the same folder if i use Res the shader does not work if i use res it does work so maybe for the next update change it to res
Fortunately we got that Vitor Vilela Widescreen Patch for Super Mario World but… isn’t Mega Bezel Reflection Shader a more universal solution by itself?
Gaussian-kernel TV Upscaler (TV PROCESS GTU in @HyperspaceMadness Mega Bezels) is an optional shader pass that simulates blur, blending effects and color levels from CRT TVs.
In the beginning I was looking at GTU as a way to simulate other-than-VGA connection, and simply throwed it out of the window as soon as master @Guest.R introduced the GDV-NTSC variant with its marvelous S-VIDEO, COMPOSITE and RF MODULATOR models.
Nowadays (as a wiser megabezel designer) I’m seriously considering to use GTU to build a new “soft flavour” mimicking consumer CRT TVs and fatigued arcade screens… there’s something with GTU that really make games feel authentic.
Here’s the pink-haired woman that made me reconsider ol’ GTU… left is processed by SMOOTH-ADV_GDV + GTU and some personal tweakes. Right is untouched.
I dare you to say that the original artist intended a lighter and bluish tint on the dress… colors feels way better and more credible with GTU and a colder CRT tinting
Ohhh, that looks awesome! And yeah, I’d love some more consumer TV-focused options. It’s what almost everyone had to use and I use that GTV-NTSC shader quite a bit to get that authentic experience. So yeah, a thumbs up for GTU from me!
Some advanced features from Mega Bezel Reflection Shader are disabled by default as these may have a noticeable impact on levels of black and can be a little distracting.
As I want people to experiment the unique features of the shader, I’m introducing a separate module to take care of the advanced lightning details, including my favourites:
tube diffuse texture
top shadow from the bezel
Ambient/lightning reflections on tube
tube emptyness+ screen black border
additional cabinet/glass texture
This is a proof of concept on my Philips TV preset, zoom or download the screenshot for full details.
Heya bezellers! This time I experimented with a fake-flat screen using cabinet glass and baked-in room reflections. The visual challenge was doing something lifelike enough, without putting distracting artifacts between gamer and his beloved games
In the raging first days of flat CRT revolution, some manufacturers built quality TVs with “almost” flat tubes and plain projection. They used a rather a simple trick to fill the remaining gap: add a lenticular glass with a side modeled against the tube profile, and a totally flat surface exposed to the final user.
So I decided to implement the thick glass in my PHILIPS 21pt3326-v7 and after like… 200 tryes I got what I wanted: something totally believable when the screen is totally black (usually in selection menus, levels statistics, loading screens) but also gentle and not bulky on colors while gaming.
I’m pretty happy with the final results, see how the reflective highlights in the center get almost unnoticeable under sir Arthur sprite!
Tnx, it’s been quite a long run with fellows artists from Mega Bezel Community!
I’m also proud @HyperspaceMadness decided to show so many different captures from my case studies with peculiar design challenges like Curse of Monkey Island illustrations antialiased smoothing, REZ wireframe downrez resampling, Star Wars and Vib Ribbon vector postprocessing.
Lots of experimentation here, I’m really happy with re-igniting life in these masterpieces!
As you’ve seen, the Libretro article is teasing lots of new scenarios and displays from my packs.
In the last weeks I’ve been extensively rebuilding my whole chain based off a new RetroArch incoming feature and flaming hot Mega Bezel 1.0 coolness, finally working out a way to add “layers” of effects in a more modular and manageable way. In current state, the pack is not compatible with public RetroArch.
The backbone is done, presets are working, I’m simply replicating everything for each scene and device combination. A boring tailoring work of love!
I hope to be ready in time for next RetroArch release
While my presets don’t have the structure to take advantage of the upcoming feature in Retroarch, I will be making use of the new night lighting features in the shader. (Once HSM finishes his work.)
There will be a lot of deep diving into presets and some new night layer renders.
I’m pretty curious to discover new games to include in my personal Amiga playlist!
)
