Shaders for various emulators

[guest.r]

No problem.

Don't forget to customize it...

Note: is for Retroarch GLSL format, not for WinUAE.

The preset goes into crt folder, the shader into crt\shaders

[Dr.Venom]

Originally Posted by guest.r

No problem.

Don't forget to customize it...

Note: is for Retroarch GLSL format, not for WinUAE.

The preset goes into crt folder, the shader into crt\shaders

Thanks, it's superfast and runs without issues when used with some of the more demanding cores on my Atom device .

For some reason though I can't get it to look as good as the crt-guest-lo-res.fx in WinUAE. Even after doing a fair amount of tweaking and testing..

Given that personal preference brings it down to a balancing act of the various parameters, it's difficult to pinpoint the difference to one of the single parameters. In WinUAE I can find a good balance between soft but clearly visible scanlines without losing screen brightness and definition, but for some reason I can't strike this balance in the retroarch version (I'm using it on a device with a 720p screen btw)..

If I would have to name one it's that the scanline parameter has a different effect? In the retroarch version there seems to be less variance in the height of the scanline when changing the scanline parameter.

Would you expect the same output result should be achievable in both or is there any material difference between the glsl version and the WinUAE one from post #85?

In any case, the most important thing is that the WinUAE version is working so great, so no worries if this is just the way it works with the retroarch opengl version. Just curious

[guest.r]

The scanlines are a bit different, more "advanced". So some parameters differ from the WinUAE version and direct transfer would be no good.

The shape is mainly affected by two parameters:

#define beam_min     0.65	  // dark area beam min - wide
#define beam_max     1.2 	  // bright area beam max - narrow

(This must be altered as the first number in the #pragma parameter code section to take effect permanently.)

The lower the numbers the stronger the scanlines.
First number determines the scanline strength in black pixel, the second on a bright one. Pixels with medium brightness get something in between.

This approach is used by most slower/advanced crt shaders.

The scanline parameter itself determines vertical sharpness and scanline shape (higher number means more rounded scanlines), but this mostly matters on high res displays.

Anyway, hope this helps a bit...

Edit: maybe this version is more authentic...

[Dr.Venom]

Awesome

I had the older version already look much better based on your tips, but this new version is even better

With regards to the mask, did you implement one that is comparable to one of the three png masks that you posted earlier? It looks like an aperture / trinitron type mask?

For WinUAE I sort of settled on the CRT-Lottes one, so just curious how that compares to the one that is in the glsl version (even though I know the implementation works very differently in WinUAE)..

Originally Posted by guest.r

Edit: maybe this version is more authentic...

[guest.r]

It uses phosphor mask, is the most neutral one.

I can add a seperate nomask shader and then another dotmask shader which contains 5 mask types (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 - 0 is phosphor, other are lottes masks).

I also fixed the RA glsl dotmask shader for 0 mask.

Speed should stay acceptable i guess.

(unpack crt-guest-nomask in crt\shaders, the preset in crt folder).

The masks can get a decent tweak also.

[Retro-Nerd]

Originally Posted by guest.r

It uses phosphor mask, is the most neutral one.

I can add a seperate nomask shader and then another dotmask shader which contains 5 mask types (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 - 0 is phosphor, other are lottes masks).

I also fixed the RA glsl dotmask shader for 0 mask.

Speed should stay acceptable i guess.

(unpack crt-guest-nomask in crt\shaders, the preset in crt folder).

The masks can get a decent tweak also.

Ah, thanks for that one. Looks pretty good in RetroArch.

[Dr.Venom]

Originally Posted by guest.r

It uses phosphor mask, is the most neutral one.

I can add a seperate nomask shader and then another dotmask shader which contains 5 mask types (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 - 0 is phosphor, other are lottes masks).

I also fixed the RA glsl dotmask shader for 0 mask.

Speed should stay acceptable i guess.

(unpack crt-guest-nomask in crt\shaders, the preset in crt folder).

The masks can get a decent tweak also.

Sorry for the late reply.

This version is absolutely fantastic, I'm loving it . It's amazing how well it can be configured to look like my Sony Trinitron CRT on just the 720p screen of my portable.

I've settled on using the CGWG dot mask. Speed wise this version is OK.

As always some questions..

It would be great if you could make a rotated version for this shader too, such that it mimics a "TATE" monitor for arcade games. Would be wonderful to try that on the likes of Donkey Kong, Bombjack etc in the MAME core.

With regards to curvature, do you know by any chance how CRT-Geom achieves it's curvature to appear without any moire effect? I think it's one of the only shaders that doesn't have the ugly moire with curvature, it must be using some "trick" to achieve that? Personally the moire is what keeps me from using any curvature on shaders (the moire is so not like a real CRT, it's really distracting).

[guest.r]

Originally Posted by Dr.Venom

Sorry for the late reply.

This version is absolutely fantastic, I'm loving it . It's amazing how well it can be configured to look like my Sony Trinitron CRT on just the 720p screen of my portable.

I've settled on using the CGWG dot mask. Speed wise this version is OK.

As always some questions..

It would be great if you could make a rotated version for this shader too, such that it mimics a "TATE" monitor for arcade games. Would be wonderful to try that on the likes of Donkey Kong, Bombjack etc in the MAME core.

With regards to curvature, do you know by any chance how CRT-Geom achieves it's curvature to appear without any moire effect? I think it's one of the only shaders that doesn't have the ugly moire with curvature, it must be using some "trick" to achieve that? Personally the moire is what keeps me from using any curvature on shaders (the moire is so not like a real CRT, it's really distracting).

I can add rotation to it, np. Hope it can find a decent use. The aspect is corrected also, otherwise the image gets a streched look.

Unfortunately i don't get any moire with crt-geom, but afaik it has been reported at libretro forums also. It might have something to do with display resolution / scale factor also since i noticed it when using hi-res (like 640x480) resolutions with lottes on PSX.
Moment...yep, the moire is also here with lottes/geom on a hi-res game in RA. I don't also use much curvature othervise.

PS: Those shaders work under Retroarch, not WinUAE.

[Dr.Venom]

Originally Posted by guest.r

I can add rotation to it, np. Hope it can find a decent use. The aspect is corrected also, otherwise the image gets a streched look.

Thanks, I gave it a go, but unfortunately it's not working out of the box correctly for my use case.

I want to use it mainly for the vertical Arcade games when using the mame core in retroarch. The thing is that MAME (and the core in RA) already rotates the screen for vertical games, so with your shader rotation added the screen is rotated to upside down. Also the aspect is incorrect as the RA core does provide the correct aspect by itself, so I don't think adjustment would be needed?

Could you possibly set up the mame libretro core for yourself too such that we can compare from same base and settings? It's a little bit finnicky to get working, but once you do it works quite nice. You need to copy your main mame installation folder to the retroarch system folder and make sure the path to the roms in system/mame.ini is correct. It could be that the mame.ini needs to be inside the ini folder for RA to pick it up, I'm not sure. Also set the core option to "read configuration = on".

If it would be possible could you do any developments with the CRT-Guest that has the different configurable masks (the one with the two passes) as I'm loving that version..

Originally Posted by guest.r

Unfortunately i don't get any moire with crt-geom

Ah, I may have worded my original message wrongly, but that is exactly what I was getting at . CRT-Geom does not have any moire when applying the curvature on low res screens. So I wondered how it achieves that? Does CRT-Geom use some "trick" in the code to prevent the moire from appearing?

For the record, CRT-Guest is my go to shader for RA now, so I was just thinking whether a CRT-Geom like curvature feature (i.e one that does not produce any moire) could be added as an option for a CRT-Guest version to use on "higher-end" / desktop setups (as it will probably be a lot slower)..

[guest.r]

Ah, it might not be rotated shader but vertical shader. I tested this version with MAME 2003 core and donkey kong / pengo and it worked fine. All masks and curvature included.

I guess lottes moire is depending on other features too, didn't notice any here. Anyway, i replaced the old shaders so they don't litter the place.

[Dr.Venom]

Thanks for this, I meant vertical shader indeed

Now I'm going to be a bit nitpicky I guess, but I've spent some fair time adjusting the two pass horizontal "dotmask" shader from post #113, see here, and found a personal optimum with that one that I'm really pleased with (I never achieved that with any other shader before) and this vertical shader has a different set of parameters / some left out . I'd rather not go through the whole tweaking proces again, possibly to find out I can't match my previous optimum because of the different parameter set.

Would it be too much to ask whether you could create the vertical version based on the two-pass dotmask version from post #113? That way I can apply my same parameters.

What I saw shortly of the curvature does make me (very) curious how it would look with the horizontal version from post #113! Since using the same set of parameters it will also be easier for me to judge what (possible moire) effect the curvature will have.

Hopefully this is not too much to ask...

[guest.r]

Np., i'm glad we're getting there.
Should be authentic now. I updated the post above.

[Dr.Venom]

Originally Posted by guest.r

Np., i'm glad we're getting there.
Should be authentic now. I updated the post above.

Thanks, I tried the updated version but there's something wonkey happening.

Please see two attached snapshots of the bombjack test / startup screen, with 4x4 integer scaling applied from within RA.

The first picture is with the original (non-vertical) shader. I've exaggerated some settings to make the mask (nr 1) clearly visible. As you can see the mask is correct and clearly distuingishable (as are the scanlines). This can be seen especially in the white squares.

Compare this to screenshot two of the exact same but now with the vertical shader. I would have expected the scanlines and mask to look like the horizontal version but only vertically orientated, but instead the image looks quite different from that. The mask isn't as cleanly distuingishable and neither the scanlines seem evenly spaced.

If you look in the white squares you'll also see vertical lines of red and green appearing, which suggests something may be off with the dotmask orientation?

Does this look the same on your side? (I gather you also have "rotate" set to 1 in mame.ini?)

[guest.r]

Yep, it's normal for this to happen. With my config (MAME 2003) vertical games use shaders differently and are rotated. There is no mechanism withing the shader framework to tell if this happens, so we must use different shaders, which means no auto setup, unfortunately.

In the second screenie the scanlines are vertical, but mask is horizontal and the result isn't good.

Maybe you could try a rotated dotmask too and see if it fits your config.

Edit: i'll rather create a new preset, so things don't get mixed up.
If somebody already downloaded previous dotmask, the original is posted above.

[Dr.Venom]

Originally Posted by guest.r

Edit: i'll rather create a new preset, so things don't get mixed up.
If somebody already downloaded previous dotmask, the original is posted above.

Thanks, works like a charm now

The curvature looks quite nice too, there is some little banding / moire with some games / settings, but I'll just have to experience whether in use that's disturbing or not.

With regards to the curvature, could you possibly add that to the horizontal shader also (from post #113)? I'm curious how the curvature will fare with some of the horizontal games I'm used to. Hopefully it'll work mostly without the banding / moire effect.

[guest.r]

Originally Posted by Dr.Venom

With regards to the curvature, could you possibly add that to the horizontal shader also (from post #113)? I'm curious how the curvature will fare with some of the horizontal games I'm used to. Hopefully it'll work mostly without the banding / moire effect.

Np, here you have it.
Cgwg and mask 2 (aperture) should cause least artifacts, but other masks should look decent to, but are a bit wider, which could interact with bent scanlines.

[Dr.Venom]

Originally Posted by guest.r

Np, here you have it.
Cgwg and mask 2 (aperture) should cause least artifacts, but other masks should look decent to, but are a bit wider, which could interact with bent scanlines.

Great, many thanks for this . The curvature works very well, there are little to no artifacts when using it. In the special case when there is a tiny bit of artifacting it's not distracting in any way.

Interestingly when comparing side by side with my sony trinitron I only need to adjust a tiny bit for the warpX to match the geometry (the Y geometry on that specific trinitron is pretty good). It's interesting how in my mind that monitor had more screen curvature than it actually has.

Thanks again for getting back to the many requests / wishes, that's really appreciated . Now it's time to enjoy them some more...

[Dr.Venom]

hi guest.r


Still using the crt-guest-dotmask shader attached in this post (quoted below), and still loving it

I now have it installed on a more powerful machine and was wondering if you could add the halation feature from easymode halation to it? That would be awesome..

Also, it's a GLSL version (which is fine), but would it be possible to create a slang version of the crt-guest-dotmask also? I'm curious whether using it with Vulkan and D3D11 will show difference performance versus the GL one.

Originally Posted by guest.r

It uses phosphor mask, is the most neutral one.

I can add a seperate nomask shader and then another dotmask shader which contains 5 mask types (0, 1, 2, 3, 4 - 0 is phosphor, other are lottes masks).

I also fixed the RA glsl dotmask shader for 0 mask.

Speed should stay acceptable i guess.

(unpack crt-guest-nomask in crt\shaders, the preset in crt folder).

The masks can get a decent tweak also.

[mcbpete]

Feel a bit stupid but ... how do you go about using these glsl shaders in WinUAE ? In the above link to guest.r's post it mentions to 'unpack crt-guest-nomask in crt\shaders, the preset in crt folder', though where does the crt folder live ? (somewhere in \WinUAE\plugins\filtershaders\ maybe?)

[Retro-Nerd]

GLSL is for OpenGL. WinUAE uses D3D though. The above shader is for RetroArch anyway.