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

This pack contains presets to use each monitor ( C1702, C1084, C1084S-D1, C1084S-D2 CDTV) in conjuntion with any of the Amiga models. So you can have c1084 with whatever you want.

When you say ‘replicates’ you mean from a background graphic assets point of view?

Or the historical simulation of c1084 screen specific image quality?

I caught you! Ahahah

Save your CPU cycles, 1080p assets are built up from 4k versions to benefit from supersampling extra-crispyness! So you can enjoy superior quality, faster shader loading times and less environmental impact :v:

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I’m asking if there’s any shader in the pack that replicates a 1084s. Until now I still couldn’t find a shader that looks like the games used to look on my amiga.

Well, maybe you’re in the right place. My Commodore Pack is based upon HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader, a poweful framework with literally hundreds of parameters to customize your simulated CRT display, including grille, color tone, phosphor persistance, tube shadows and so on.

Using ‘simple presets’ feature you can start from one of my presets and create your customized one just tuning parameters in realtime to make your games look as close as possible to your original amiga setup. This will provide you a very solid starting point to build your personalized experience.

You’ll simply never find a shader that replicates exactly what you remember out-of-the-box:

  • Your Amiga and display combo was unique because of manufacturing and age
  • Each one of us has a different perception of colors and brightness
  • Modern displays LCD/QLED/OLED technology is totally different from CRT one games were aimed towards
  • Memory can be such a wonderful, unreliable beast to tame

I won’t lie to you: my pack aims to retro-enhancement, meaning I want my games to look somewhat BETTER than they were on my ancient commodore hardware. This means more fluid, more vivid and bright, with less artifacts and letterboxes, easy to my eyes while preserving CRT reproduction aestethic charm.

No historical urgence here, I gave up on this the first day I tried making c1702 look different from c1084 by guesswork (even if I retained the technical possibility to have specific configs for each display under the hood, because you never know in life).

Good luck with your customization, I hope to see something from you asap! :relaxed:

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Question out of topic @TheNamec : apart from Retroarch, I was wondering if you never wanted to make a theme for FS-UAE or WinUAE ?

It would not be difficult considering I have vector graphics.

POTATO square assets (no curvature) were born to be used as classic RetroArch overlays, so it would require just some positioning with coordinates and eventually PNGs for blinking LEDs and drive buttons to build those themes. Nothing difficult at all!

Can you confirm blinking is just for disk drives, and not for power and hard drive LEDs? It would be quite a bad trade losing reflections, postprocessing and multilayering from Mega Bezel Reflections shader just for floppy led interactivity (HDF being much better than ADF) :thinking:

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Check your PM :wink:

You can change color for power (mine boot green and show orange when the game is loaded) but it’s not very important. For the rest, you can display when df0/1/2/3 LED is active, when a disk is inserted into df0/1/2/3… same for HD (WHDload) and CD if you want.

For floppy drives, you can show track numbers also (and FPS) :wink:

Ex FS-UAE :

Screenshots

my last theme for FS-UAE (with the help of your work :wink: )

df0/1/2/3 blinking when is active (better than a simple led i think)

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Here I am, back from holidays! :swimming_man:

With the new alpha package from tireless @HyperspaceMadness, I can get back at work normalizing bezels code for better scaling and positioning. This is a major issue I have to take care of before releasing the next update to the Commodore Pack.

This morning I had quite a rough time trying to config FS-UAE, this reminds me of WinUAE old days from a UI perspective! To me, RetroArch P-UAE core really is light-years ahead in terms of easiness of use for a console-like gaming experience.

Nowadays I really find it unusable having to deal with config file manual editing to specify a theme to use, BTW LEDs and media presence seems to be pretty cool features. I hope Libretro will develop some way to have interactivity for our overlays, sooner or later!!!

I think I will refine the A1200 Synthwave design to include some of the features in a more “natural” way for FS-UAE, while keeping the static assets for the Mega Bezel edition. Of course, this is low priority for now as I’m fixing things for next RC, but may end up included in the point release of the Commodore Pack.

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Great Pack! :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

Is it possible to get the C64 ones from the Screenshots? Would love to use it for my Launchbox Setup.

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Thank you! :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

C64 and VIC20 surely are on my roadmap to complete the Commodore Pack, together with some undisclosed content I’ve been mining in ancient Commodore empire depths. :v: Good things come to those who wait!

At the moment I’m working on the coding side to update/fix things for better scaling, the Mega Bezel Reflections Shader engine is in a very fluid phase as we keep on going further with new features and squashing existing quirks.

Atm my internal codebase counts 294 amiga presets and 62 display presets. I’m pretty confident RC2 is not too far away, but I need to have stable presets before coming up with new content, things are getting pretty hard to mantain!!!

In the meanwhile, I added a new hi-end c1902 monitor for the mighty C64 :sunglasses:

Have a little sneak peak of some rare DreanComm64 from Argentina with its own custom DC-120 datassette :innocent:

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and it smell Maybe something about Mega C65 :grin:

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Ahah if we get into those modern replicas, we should consider the shiny new TheA500 Mini, with its incredible collection of 25 (!!!) licensed titles, just a couple titles missing considering the Wikipedia list for Amiga games counts 2198 items.

I can’t understand the efforts around FPGA simulation based machines to replicate hw experience! I prefer to give my contribute to the Raspberry Foundation when it comes to attaching something small and silent to my TV set to embrace some unpretentious, open source LAKKA retrogaming.

With emulation software taking giant leaps in terms of performance and accuracy, I think it’s better to stay on the software side of emulation with all the benefits and enhencements :sunglasses: and of course, the Mega Bezel Reflections. :grin:

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Fixing color mesh on vectors sometimes make me remember of my 3D modeling days, when rendering was slow and lightning was more of a cat-and-mouse game. In comparison 2D illustration is far more relaxing: all you need is here in the artboard, waiting for some more details and shapes and little light bounces. Perfect for these hot summer days!

Here’s a naked shot from the Bezeltron-001 TV display for your pleasure.

And yes, those speaker grill holes were digitally drilled one by one.

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When I first designed the Amiga 1200Synth overlay I deeply investigated GoTek add-on being fashinated by the possibility to have gigabytes of simulated data on real Amiga hardware without the need of old magnetic floppies. So I imagined putting this addon into a somewhat futuristic, dark retroconsole with a synthwave flavour, hence Amiga 1200Synth was born.

Dreamweb (AGA) on Amiga 1200Synth rev.3

But what if we could have realtime LED indicators and multifloppy simulation, full with Read Access indicators and cylinder tracking?

This is not yet possible to achieve in RetroArch, but I hope that one day, sooner or later, we will have this feature worked out. Do designers dream of electric sheep?

Announcing FS-UAE Amiga 1200Synth theme

Video courtesy from an FS-UAE theme soon to come… :grin:

A brief sneak peek of working LED indicators for Hard Disk Drive, Optical Disk Drive and Power

In this short video you can see 3 distinct theme features:

  • Real-time cylinder number tracking
  • Read Access (RA) notification
  • Media presence on DF0, DF1 and DF2 indicated by on-off switches

@HyperspaceMadness this is cool and all, but without reflections everything feel so… matte. :weary: Mega Bezel on Libretro P-UAE is the place I call home for my Commodore itches. Ahahah :heart_eyes:

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Sorry for the late reply, but I’m glad somebody found a use for my Philips TV Image Finds.

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it’s just…splendide…a good part of my ideas that i had in my head come to live with you… really awesome and what a skill…

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Thanks! It required some revision of the A1200Synth to adapt to FS-UAE theme features, but in the end I was able to hammer-in some cool tricks while looking at actual real-life GoTek adaptor operations.

I contacted Frode Solheim for an eventual publication on official emulator site and I’m waiting for him to answer about other theme features I may have missed. Screen positioning behind the overlay is pure black magic to me, I had to go brute forcing by trial and error. :sweat:

Let’s hope he shares our enthusiasm toward our little cyber-amiga! :alien:

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Thanks to a really lucky astral conjunction between me, mr. @HyperspaceMadness and mr. @guest.r I completed the first simulated monochromatic monitor in overlays history with actual amber, green and black/white variations. :partying_face:



A little step for a man, a big step for the LO-FI.

Too bad the phosphor persistance trail effect doesn’t work with RetroArch screenshots, I’d try to record a video as it really adds a spark of magic to the lo-fi visuals.

Now leave me alone with my unnatural, monochromatic Amiga tests :exploding_head:

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Heya guys! I’d like to share some recap about Release Candidate 2 that will probably come out sometimes in September.

Massive work is undergoing in collaboration with the Mega Bezel Reflection Shader creators community in preparation of the next shader public release.

Fist of all, here’s a nice graphic with my performance tests of the internal build. Lots of info and nice new features here!

MORE EXTREME-NESS

The enhancement-specific profile gains a deeply improved ScaleFX resample, an additional layer of texture via fake scanlines, Fast Sharpen from Guest.r, tuned TV process GTU and brightness. Once you go Extreme, you can’t go back!

STANDARD PROFILE RELOADED

I decided to shift the STANDARD profile from pre-baked overlay to classic multilayer solution, making it a performance valid alternative to ADVANCED and EXTREME on par with the main features, including scalable/moveable display and adaptive design.

HOT POTATO

My original POTATO was a stripped-down version of the basic Mega Bezel Reflection Shader. The new one leverages on the lightning fast dedicated solution based on ZFAST shader to bring CRT eye candy on weak machines.

For more effects on potato you will be able to choose canonical GDV and EASYMODE alternative, but I made ZFAST the default because promises to be 2-3x times faster than alternatives!

In my tests I hit some hardcoded cap while measuring, but as you can see multilayer STD profile stands on 215 frames per second, while POT overlay pushes more than 5500 fps!!!

NEW CONTENT

As you can see in captures from this thread, I added some new display, these will be available for each system model out-of-the-box.

The australian monochrome c1201 will be available in three phosphor variations and it’s really, really fun to see it in action with both Amiga 16 bit graphics and incoming 8 bit Commodore gloryes!

c1902 offers a lot of gameplay area, being it a quite essential monitor a lot of people used in the old time.

CRT Series BezelTron-001 is the first television in the pack, designed to be used with Amiga CD32 but available for all the systems.

Amiga 1200Synth has been revised to converge to the FS-UAE theme, and I find the multi floppy emulator to be more clean and less cluttered than before. Also, banding artifacts are gone!

IN CONCLUSION

Stay tuned. Good thing come to those who wait! :wink:

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200 and counting!

I’m very proud to announce we reached 200 downloads for Release Candidate 1 of TheNamec Commodore Pack!

Opera Snapshot_2021-09-06_143355

While the 1080p edition is taking the lead, lots of people choose to go 4k for a UltraHD Commodore bliss!

Next step

Following the recent public release of HSM Mega Bezel Reflection Shader I can speed-up on refining content for Commodore Pack Release Candidate 2 :sunglasses:

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