If you had to choose just one shader, which one would it be? Is CRT Royale now considered the best there is?
CRT-Geom is still a strong alternative, depending on your tastes. Each is unique.
CRT-Easymode with brightness boost at 1.3 is my main right now. Itās fast and barely loses any brightness.
Iāve had this issue with Royale in nightlies for quite awhile, so I donāt use it much anymore. I canāt get the shadow mask looking good with any of the resize modes at 1080. The other two mask types look fine with the default sinc resize mode, but I donāt like how they blur text and change colors.
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Lotteās Halation with no curvature and no shadow mask
CRT easymode is really nice, but Iām using a Raspberry Pi and it barely canāt handle it. Do you think removing lanczos filter would speed it up enough to run smoothly? Or, is there anything else you could do to improve performance. I really like the scanlines + aperture grille effect.
Iām using Hyllian-glow (without the glow) right now and itās good but it makes text look kind of off. Then I saw some settings you had posted in another forum: -scanline strength 60% -sharpness hack enabled -bloom strength 0
Iām unable to run the cg2glsl script myself, as I donāt have a computer with the right hardware.
Is there any way to get parameter options working on the raspberry pi? Iād really like to try those settings as well as get crt-easymode to work.
I remember Easymode saying he had optimized the shader about as well as he could, so Iām not sure if that would help.
From what Iāve read it sounds like youād have to bake parameter settings in a .cg somehow before converting it to .glsl to use them on a platform like the Pi.
Yes, Awakened is correct: the values in the parameter block where it says: #else #define whatever #endif are the ones that get baked in, so you can modify those to the values you want.
@Nesguy If you want an aperture grille effect thatās lightweight enough for the RPi, check out the dotmask shader, which is just that little bit from cgwgās CRT shaders isolated. You can put it after scanlines or whatever.
Either CRT-Geom with the following settings changedā¦
#define CRTgamma 2.2 #define monitorgamma 2.4 #define CURVATURE 0.0 #define cornersize 0.001
(or change crtgamma to 2.0 & monitorgamma to 2.6 if you want a bit more brightness to the display)
CRT-Easymode with the following settings changedā¦
#define BRIGHT_BOOST 1.3 #define GAMMA_INPUT 1.8 #define GAMMA_OUTPUT 2.0 #define MASK_STRENGTH 0.2 #define SCANLINE_BRIGHT_MAX 0.25 #define SCANLINE_BRIGHT_MIN 0.15 #define SHARPNESS_H 0.65
I have tried Lotteās Halation shader but for some reason i just get really bad performance for some reason(have an i7 @4.2Ghz and a GTX 970). CRT Royale is only really good for displays above 1080p
Yeah this is what Easymode help me with yesterday for Lordashramās OpenElec build, for some reason atm cg shaders do not work so we have to use glsl shader. So you have to edit the cg shader with something like notepad++ and then save the file, thenā¦
- Install Python (C:\Python will do)
- Install the Nvidia Cg Toolkit
- Copy TheMaisterās cg2glslscript to that folder
- Create two subfolders called ācgā and āglslā
- Copy the .cg shaders you want to convert to the ācgā folder
- Edit them with the changes you want (as mentioned above)
- In command prompt go to the python folder and run: python cg2glsl.py cg glsl
[QUOTE=BlockABoots;22138]Yeah this is what Easymode help me with yesterday for Lordashramās OpenElec build, for some reason atm cg shaders do not work so we have to use glsl shader. So you have to edit the cg shader with something like notepad++ and then save the file, thenā¦
- Install Python (C:\Python will do)
- Install the Nvidia Cg Toolkit
- Copy TheMaisterās cg2glslscript to that folder
- Create two subfolders called ācgā and āglslā
- Copy the .cg shaders you want to convert to the ācgā folder
- Edit them with the changes you want (as mentioned above)
- In command prompt go to the python folder and run: python cg2glsl.py cg glsl[/QUOTE]
Awesome. Thanks for the instructions.
Well, after all this experimenting, I think the simple interlacing.glsl shader is the best looking one for the pi. Itās been fun playing around with all these shaders and overlays, but interlacing.glsl with the backlight cranked up is like playing on a perfect, āidealā CRT with no flaws. Itās like a Sony BVM, but better. In the end, Hyllian looked a little too artificial to me, although pleasant. I think interlacing.glsl will suit my needs when it comes to the raspberry pi. 
I think Iām still going to give Hyllian with the suggesting settings a try, though.
Still would like to know which shaders people are using on their own machines, just out of curiosity.
[QUOTE=Nesguy;22152] Still would like to know which shaders people are using on their own machines, just out of curiosity. :)[/QUOTE] As you said you were using 720p output on PI, I think crt shaders do not show good resulta at that res, barely over 3 times The native res of most retro systems. Only after 4 times that res you get The benefits of these crt shaderd.
About my favorite shaders. Well it depend on The Day and The mood. I donāt have a favorite among The crt ones. All have their advantages and cons. For all purpose shader I recommend jinc2-sharper or lanczos2-sharp. For cartoon games I recommend one of the xbr available. For 3D games I recommend ar shader 4.o with core at high internal res. For psx I recommend a combination from the cgp xbr-jinc2-sharper.cgp
[QUOTE=Hyllian;22156]As you said you were using 720p output on PI, I think crt shaders do not show good resulta at that res, barely over 3 times The native res of most retro systems. Only after 4 times that res you get The benefits of these crt shaderd.
About my favorite shaders. Well it depend on The Day and The mood. I donāt have a favorite among The crt ones. All have their advantages and cons. For all purpose shader I recommend jinc2-sharper or lanczos2-sharp. For cartoon games I recommend one of the xbr available. For 3D games I recommend ar shader 4.o with core at high internal res. For psx I recommend a combination from the cgp xbr-jinc2-sharper.cgp[/QUOTE]
This is good to know, I always wondered if maybe 720p just wasnāt high enough to get the results I wanted. I guess that simple scanline generators / shaders are the way to go for the raspberry pi. Interlacing.cg works rather well on the raspberry pi, as do the scanline overlays. I just wish there was some way to do a simple aperture grille simulation on top of the scanlines, but that would take 1080p resolution and Iām not sure the pi could handle it. Plus, Iām guessing that it would be incredibly dark and would require some kind of image adjustment to get back the color and contrast.
The overlays run fine at 1080p, so Iām wondering now if it would be possible to create an overlay that would do what interlacing.cg does - completely blank every other line, while also adding a very light/fine aperture grill simulation. I think this would just take some very light grey pixels arranged in columns, spaced out every few pixels or so. I wonder if that would even look good.
You may have missed this post on the previous page: http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2779&p=22134&viewfull=1#post22134
That shader is very lightweight and should look fine at 720p. I used to use cgwgās CRT shaders on my HTPC at 720p, and they generally look pretty decent even at that low scale. <- Note: thatās just the aperture grille simulation, not the whole thing, which would be way to heavy for RPi.
[QUOTE=hunterk;22178]You may have missed this post on the previous page: http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2779&p=22134&viewfull=1#post22134
That shader is very lightweight and should look fine at 720p. I used to use cgwgās CRT shaders on my HTPC at 720p, and they generally look pretty decent even at that low scale. <- Note: thatās just the aperture grille simulation, not the whole thing, which would be way to heavy for RPi.[/QUOTE]
I saw that, but itās not quite the effect Iām after. Iām just looking to add some very fine, light vertical lines spaced close together. Oh well, Iām starting to like the look of just blanking every other line with the interlacing shader. Simple is beautiful
Thatās all that shader does, actually. It separates the pixels into 3 parts, tints one part pink, leaves the middle alone and then tints the last part green. Hereās what it looks like against a plain white background:
You can also checkout the interlacing-phosphor shader, which just combines interlacing with the dotmask effect. Thereās also a toggle for the mask effect from crt-lottes, but itās enabled through the parameters, so youād have to enable it in the code and then convert to glsl for rpi2.
[QUOTE=hunterk;22194]Thatās all that shader does, actually. It separates the pixels into 3 parts, tints one part pink, leaves the middle alone and then tints the last part green. Hereās what it looks like against a plain white background:
You can also checkout the interlacing-phosphor shader, which just combines interlacing with the dotmask effect. Thereās also a toggle for the mask effect from crt-lottes, but itās enabled through the parameters, so youād have to enable it in the code and then convert to glsl for rpi2.[/QUOTE]
I canāt get interlacing-phosphor to run without slowdown and I canāt get them to combine, either. Oh well, thanks for trying Iām pretty happy with just using the interlacing shader, but Iād like to know if itās possible to create a scanline overlay with scanlines that can be adjusted to full black, and that doesnāt affect the brightness of the drawn lines.
[QUOTE=BlockABoots;22138]Yeah this is what Easymode help me with yesterday for Lordashramās OpenElec build, for some reason atm cg shaders do not work so we have to use glsl shader. So you have to edit the cg shader with something like notepad++ and then save the file, thenā¦
- Install Python(C:\Python will do)
- Install the Nvidia Cg Toolkit
- Copy TheMaisterās cg2glslscript to that folder
- Create two subfolders called ācgā and āglslā
- Copy the .cg shaders you want to convert to the ācgā folder
- Edit them with the changes you want (as mentioned above)
- In command prompt go to the python folder and run: python cg2glsl.py cg glsl[/QUOTE] Iām getting [WinError 2] āFile not foundā error, what can it be? I have the .cg shader under right folder
[QUOTE=BlockABoots;22138]Yeah this is what Easymode help me with yesterday for Lordashramās OpenElec build, for some reason atm cg shaders do not work so we have to use glsl shader. So you have to edit the cg shader with something like notepad++ and then save the file, thenā¦
- Install Python (C:\Python will do)
- Install the Nvidia Cg Toolkit
- Copy TheMaisterās cg2glslscript to that folder
- Create two subfolders called ācgā and āglslā
- Copy the .cg shaders you want to convert to the ācgā folder
- Edit them with the changes you want (as mentioned above)
- In command prompt go to the python folder and run: python cg2glsl.py cg glsl[/QUOTE]
just wanted to say that this helped tremendously, thanks! I was looking all over for simple instructions for how to use this.
One thing, though: if you follow your instructions in the exact order, you wind up with the glsl and cg folders, and the cg2glsl script in the āNvidiaā folder when they need to go in the āpythonā folder.
CRT-Hyllian with sharpness hack enabled and scanlines at 100% looks fantastic It seems to do just enough filtering to hide the scaling artifacts you get when running SNES, NES, and Genesis in a 4:3 aspect ratio, without looking obvious.
What does ācolor boostā do, though? Changing it from 1.2 to 1.0 doesnāt seem to do anything.
Edit: Bah, never mind. I think raspberry pi users just need to avoid shaders unless they are on a 720p display, or else donāt mind scaling artifacts. There is just nothing you can do to completely eliminate the artifacts when rendering at 960x720 and upscaling to 1080p (raspberry pi canāt handle shaders above 960x720).
Interlacing works at 1080p but with integer scale it puts further restrictions on screen size.
The best option for pi users using 1080p displays who want perfect scaling and scanlines is to turn integer scale on, set a custom resolution that is close to a 4:3 aspect ratio, and use an overlay for scanlines. I donāt think thereās a better way.