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

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.

Iā€™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 gamesā€¦ 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 couldnā€™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 ā€˜lockedā€™ 4:3 1.33 AR non-integer solution. :unamused:

But I promise, as soon as I overcome the shock, Iā€™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 ā€œ78.000000ā€ instead of ā€œ78.200000ā€. What about even/uneven values? Feels like Iā€™m re-living some Macromedia Flash subpixel aliasing nightmareā€¦ :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 donā€™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 canā€™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 %

Iā€™m quite close to the 74% value in my current presetsā€¦ but 89%? is way too big!

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

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Iā€™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 didnā€™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 wasnā€™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

Hereā€™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 butā€¦ hey! Itā€™s a mutant planet in the 90s, itā€™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 ā€˜Mutant Planetā€™ for a ā€˜Lost Dimensionā€™. The PC Engine saw the addition of a 3ā€™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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This is excellent work! When I get some free time I might take some more in but I have yet to delve into Jim Power fully and I wouldnā€™t want to encounter any spoilers.

Iā€™m glad and honoured to see yet another video showcasing my presets! I might have to do some cross linking on my thread soon!

Itā€™s only been a little over a week and itā€™s already crossed 1,300 views with a couple hundred downloads of my presets (estimated). Itā€™s hard to keep track of the exact total because Iā€™ve been updating the links a bit frequently over the last few days. With that said I have added 6 new presets to the package! These arenā€™t minor tweaks, I would consider them a complete overhaul once again, bringing improved sharpness, more detail and better overall image quality that I hadnā€™t envisioned was possible by me (maybe by others thoughā€¦lol).

So I invite and encourage you to download the CyberLab Mega Bezel Death To Pixels Shader Preset Pack 21-11-21 (or later) and try out my new PVM Edition presets. They are exceptionally clear but still maintain that balance of smoothing while still maintaining that element of ā€œ16-bitnessā€ that we all love.

Seeing is believing though. The difference between these and the previous presets are like the difference between putting on glasses if you have less than perfect vision and not! Theyā€™re that much better! Yes, I would say better and not just clearer.

However life is not perfect and there are some slight caveats if you look carefully enough. I achieved this clarity by manipulating the very things that added up to give me the colours, brightness and gamma that I had in my previous presets. Things have shifted slightly as a result. Who knows, maybe theyā€™re more accurate nowā€¦lol Iā€™ve been struggling to get the brightness and gamma to match the previous presets without messing things up. Tonight I just gave up and increased the brightness of my TV. lol

I havenā€™t had time to post any screenshots nor test and develop 1440p and 1080p optimized versions yet but I have a feeling that they will scale pretty well down to those resolutions even without special optimized versions. 1080p should be pretty safe as the settings I usually adjust to match the sharpness of my 4K presets are already pretty low in this set so I doubt thereā€™s anywhere else to go. The only problem might be if the scanline adjustments donā€™t work well at the lower resolutions.

For my 1440p Edition presets all I usually do is change the Mask Type to 7 and the Mask Size to 2 then lower settings that reduce sharpness a bit like halation. In this case halation is already very low.

The issue with brightness is that the individual phosphors have much more space between them and thus the mask and scanlines are more prominent so I might be kinda running into similar issue as @Nesguy has been talking about when talking about his ideal TV for emulating a CRT. I donā€™t think I can get this preset to match those aspects of the previous presets without basically changing them back by making the phosphors converge as they did previously.

With that said theyā€™re still much better in my opinion. Perhaps you or someone else might have an idea of how to properly calibrate and colour correct them without messing with the scanline settings? That would be brilliant if itā€™s possible.

Updated: Seems like thereā€™s absolutely no need to make 1080p optimized version of my PVM Edition Presets! Theyā€™re just as sharp and detailed as at 4K as is and scanlines seem to be looking fine as well! So you can go ahead and start to use them right away if you wish!

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Thank you my friend! Iā€™m keeping an eye on Muzzaā€™s Turrican2 pc/Amiga hack, somebody suggested a Jim Power pc/Amiga hybrid to get the best from each. Too bad the recent AmigaCD32 conversion with PC-Engine reorchestrated ost is paywalled at 55$!!!

Congrats for the views! May I suggest using GitHub to keep track of versioning, releases and downloads? It would be even easier to follow your development.

As I have my own pvm/bvm project under development, it would be quite funny to test those ideal monitors to the real counterparts from people on r/crtgaming

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Thanks! Itā€™s something that Iā€™ll consider. Can you elaborate as to these benefits as these days free time is very hard to come by.

Yes, I do have your quest in the back of my mind as well as the things you said in youā€™re post describing what you liked and disliked about my presets. The funny thing is back then, I was very excited about how things were looking but with these new refinements, I probably canā€™t go back to using my previous presets that I thought made me feel so satisfied before. When you compare them one after the other, the new ones just easily look so much better that it makes me want to play all my games over again.

I guess thatā€™s how we grow and evolve as we live. Itā€™s like we canā€™t just stop and get back to playing games like 1995 again! Lol

By the way, Iā€™ve been making notes in my readme file every time I update my presets. I donā€™t know if you noticed. Thatā€™s one way to keep track of my changes and development and another is to keep checking back at the end and start of each day.

The preset files in the _common directory have no effect after opening. Can you tell me why? The presets in the amiga directory are perfect. Thanks again for your great work.

Thank you and welcome to my Mega Bezel packs!

In short, _common folder should not be directly opened by the final user, thatā€™s why you see no effect.

The presets in the _common folder are just general resources used by all the Amiga presets (and by the new incoming packs), think to them as fragments to compose the final picture.

This way I can combine all the different displays, levels of zoom, performance variations together to get new presets just by adding new graphics.

If you go up in this thread you will find the complete scheme of my chaining system. To the retrogamer, the only folder that matters is the Amiga one :wink:

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Just to be sure Alessandro, the link do not exist anymore ?

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Hey Oneshout, sorry for the late answer!

The FS-UAE repo is temporarily private as I intend to launch the specific thread on https://eab.abime.net/, I donā€™t feel like Libretro forum being the right place for non-RetroArch projects. The good news is I was finally able to reach out FS-UAE author (by pure chance) and will coordinate with him as promisedā€¦ as long as he cares! Ahahah :sweat_smile:

I know youā€™ve been waiting for this patiently, the theme is in a pretty good state and only needs minor adjustments. Too bad that template system being not so well documented, I had a pretty hit-or-miss scenario while building the A1200Synth and while Iā€™d be glad to convert all the Amiga overlays I know it will require a ride on a quite boring path.

Iā€™ll notify you as soon as I have a release window! I swear on my A500 honor. :crossed_fingers:

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yeaā€¦ just happy that the project isnā€™t down. Tks for the news :wink:

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The update before the storm!

The Bato-gate

I know, I knowā€¦ itā€™s been ages since I last updated the devlog, I must admit the stealing of my Amiga and (unpublished!) C64 assets from some Batocera guy had a pretty bad aftermath. I stopped doing videos and my repo got dusty. :weary:

This will eventually force me to change my license to a Non-derivative license to block people spreading unauthorized remixes based upon stolen assets without even contacting me. This makes me pretty sad, as I really wanted people to help me with their ideas: the FS-UAE theme would never exist without @oneshout own concept (thank you sir :heart:). But I canā€™t stand someone came on this thread, cut away watermark from promotional content and distributing it in a major distro without even asking.

After some drama me and the collective behind the Mega Bezel Reflection Shader decided to officially contribute with some handmade assetsā€¦ Batocera is a big project, Iā€™ll do my best to recover the low quality edits the did from my assets. Butā€¦

The Bezel factory

ā€¦my priority stays on Mega Bezels, as weā€™re approaching the first stable release! Master @HyperspaceMadness is ironing out details, still adding features for us to work better, faster and stronger. Itā€™s been a pretty exciting ride, and weā€™re getting to first finish line: the 1.0 release!

On my side, Iā€™ve been pretty busy updating all of my presets to new internal alphas, while trying to add some new contents and integrating @Cyber hot 'n spicy Death to Pixel shaders.

The new PVM-SERIES pack (and retrowalls)

People from r/crtgaming has been helping me tracking down some of the ā€œholy grailā€ CRT displays, so I ended up with a first batch of PVM/BVM displays from Sony and JVC and decided to use the real brand in conjunction with my personal BEZELTRON trademark. The PVM-SERIES will launch with a new ā€œretrowallā€ solution that will display the fully modeled devices!

Of course, Iā€™m collecting ideas for some retro-themed backdrops and ambient solutions. This will shape up fast and funny.

What about Commodore Pack?

I can hear you, the C64 update is on the finish line and will be included with the new RC3. As soon as I complete the work on presets for 1.0 release, Iā€™ll be back on adding more new Commodore content on the Amiga side.

See you soon Bezellers!

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Wow, this looks amazing! @TheNamec I canā€™t wait to put my hands into it!

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I second that! :smiley: These displays are looking awesome!!! :star_struck:

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