xBRZ... shaders for FS-UAE

hi!

first of all thanks guest.r for providing some awesome shaders!

like all of us i am chasing for the perfect shader / settings for fs-uae to reproduce that magic amiga feeling on a 1080p-screen as close as possible. i am not a pro in these things so i have some questions left:

1.) my native resolution is 1080p. i think i like the most your hyllian-shader. i have combined the hints given in this thread and have put the following values under "advanced" in the fs-uae-settings:

fullscreen_mode = fullscreen
line_doubling = 0
low_resolution = 1
scale_x = 6.0
scale_y = 5.0
shader = crt-hyllian.shader

my others settings are under video zoom display: 704x540 + keep ar: on + start fullscreen

are these the correct settings? when launching a game the whole (wide)screen is filled out, so it seems to be that my keep ar-setting is not working.

2.) anything else how to optimize the above mentioned entries? is there something wrong/missing? how are your advanced-entries looking? could you provide a sample?

3.) is there any chance to programm / convert the "king of shaders" for fs-uae: crt-easymode like provided in retroarch?

best regards & thank you

[guest.r]

Hi pellewolf!

Thanks for giving the shaders a try, FS-UAE has a good shader implementation, making it possible to port a variety of shaders which work as intended.

I will try to give some relevant feedback on your questions.

1. & 2. With 1080p you are good with these shaders and they (scanlines) don't require integer scaling. The catch is a clever solution came up with crt-geom, as i recall, to calculate the influence of a neighbour scanline too and it looks way better with non-integer scaling. But it's still an option for hardcore fans and only y-integer scale is really required. You might skip zoom and go with some overscan lol if games can take it.

What my config (for games) looks like:

keep_aspect = 1
line_doubling = 0
low_resolution = 1
shader = crt-easymode

Nothing special, got used to it lol.

...and which comes to question 3. - sure, no problem. Has tons of options and looks preety.
I hope it works out of the box.

[Retro-Nerd]

It does. Default settings. But i still hope that Frode will support CRT-Royale at some point.

CRT-easymode

guest.r, your work is impressive!
I've been looking for a convincing CRT shader for AGES. I think the one I really like is crt-lottes-origin.shader, because I dig the round edges and fortunately I have a strong GDDR5 video card.
Any chance you could make that shader work in HiRes too? Sometimes Amiga games feature HiRes effects, title screens and other things, so I got used to keep HiRes on in WinUae, and I'd like to do the same thing with FS-Uae.
Anyway, you've been great, thanks a lot!

[guest.r]

Hey Diduz, no problem!

I adapted the Lottes shader for HiRes, hope it will serve you well.

There is a catch though, in hires this shader only samples every other pixel, so it might spoil some interlaced screens. No simple fix around that.
Otherwise it works as intended.

So i rather throw in an extra shader, just for the case, which can handle the hires specifics, but look a bit different, less blury, but with lottes mask, scanlines and curvature.

Just for the case.

[nobody]

CRT hyllian low res looks good on Winuae. Probably the best CRT shader for Winuae.

Originally Posted by guest.r

So i rather throw in an extra shader, just for the case, which can handle the hires specifics, but look a bit different, less blury, but with lottes mask, scanlines and curvature.

I am officially blown away. The new gl shader you came up with is the first shader which really manages to remind me of the Philips CM8833 I had. The shader retains all lottes' qualities, but it's definitely sharper.
Let's say the original lottes is more akin to an average late-80s / early-90s PAL TV.
Anyway, the gl shader handles the hires mode without problems, whereas the original lottes has some issues with the Workbench 320x512.
So... I'll stick with the gl.hires (although I set the brightboost to 1.5, because I think the default 1.0 is a bit too dark).
You made my day, mister.

EDIT: Dosbox Daum could really benefit from a shader like this, but I am not sure its .fx specifics are the same WinUae uses.

[guest.r]

I'm glad you like it and that it turned out well. I also think Lottes works very well with Amiga games, perhaps even better then on SNES ones for example.
Yep, Dosbox also likes CRT shaders, maybe not all games, but quite lot of it.

You can give this shader a try with Daum, should do well.
Normal2x scaler is to be used with it.
Curvature dosen't work though, no way around that.

@nobody: you are welcome and yea the previous crt shaders have a bid bugged shadowmask.

Edit: small fix to the shader.

Edit2: Another fix, scaler should be set to none now.

hey guest.r i can not say enough how happy you made me (and probably all of us) providing those awesome shader(s) (conversions). for months and months i crawled the net to find a site or thread like this.

so please don't think i am greedy but i hope it's ok for you if i may request two more shaders, these would bring me to shaders' heaven ;-) :

1.) with dosbox-daum my favourite combo is hqx2-scaler in connection with shader CRT.D3D.br.fx -> would it be possible to provide that shader also for fs-uae?

2.) i know this is an amiga-forum but i saw you uploaded Lottes-Shader for Dosbox here. so it would be amazing if you could also provide CRT-Easymode-Shader for Dosbox for us. would that also be possible?

3.) @all: i am still a little confused about optimal resolution-settings in fs-uae. what do you use? like mentioned before i have a 1080p-screen and want to play fullscreen with correct ar.

what resolution looks best / what should i choose in fs-uae-"Scaling & Filters"-section (in connection with a shader)?

Zoom Amiga Display (crop): ?
Keep AR when Scaling: ?
Render scan lines: ?
Render scan lines in RTG graphics mode: ?

And what settings do you recommend in "Advanced Video Settings"-Tab? Leave everything on default or maybe AA on?

thank you!

Originally Posted by guest.r

You can give this shader a try with Daum, should do well.
Normal2x scaler is to be used with it.
Curvature dosen't work though, no way around that.

Thanks! I tried it yesterday but it didn't work well, I got unusally large black scanlines and the high-res DOS prompt looked like lowres. I wonder if the updated version will do the trick. I'm going to test it later today.

[Photon]

Cool!

But if it's to emulate CRT, there must be no horizontal pixel spacing as in the latest pictures. Pixels melting together horizontally but not vertically is what creates the scanlines. But maybe this can be turned off?

[guest.r]

Fixed the Lottes for Dosbox, should look more regular now. It looks best with lores games on 1080p.

@pellewolf

1.) I used the crt-geom shader (crt-d3d is a lighter derivate of it) and scaled with xbr instead (way better scaler). So the result is more HQ, tad slower though. - note: For FS-UAE

2.) Why not. (CRT-Easymode works with scaler: none) - note: for Dosbox (Gulikoza, Daum).

3.) I wouldn't worry too much with built in scanlines (we got shaders), AA (works with interface only) or Zoom (Zoom Auto is OK) options.
You can tweak this if you know what you want to achieve, but it's best to start with a simple config i posted above. It's smart enough already.

Happyhats!

[Retro-Nerd]

Looks great in Dosbox Daum. Thanks again, guest.





Maybe you should open another thread. If you plan to port more shaders to other emulators.

simply amazing thank you very much. sorry to stay off amiga-topic for the moment, but one more question regarding your dosbox-daum-combo scaler = xbr + shader = crt-geom:

is use this great little dosbox-frontend dbgl, maybe you also tested it. pretty handy and nice. if i edit a game under display->official options where i can choose the the xbr-scaler - it is not offered here, only many other scalers. next to it under "experimental options" i can choose crt-geom-blend.fx -> do you mean that shader? how do i add and where to get this xbr-scaler to set it up und use together with geom-shader?

[guest.r]

@Retro-Nerd: i guess i won't do much more shaders for other systems here.
An exeption or two perhaps...

1.) with dosbox-daum my favourite combo is hqx2-scaler in connection with shader CRT.D3D.br.fx -> would it be possible to provide that shader also for fs-uae?

is use this great little dosbox-frontend dbgl, maybe you also tested it. pretty handy and nice. if i edit a game under display->official options where i can choose the the xbr-scaler - it is not offered here, only many other scalers. next to it under "experimental options" i can choose crt-geom-blend.fx -> do you mean that shader? how do i add and where to get this xbr-scaler to set it up und use together with geom-shader?

Sorry for the confusion, xbr2x-crt is a FS-UAE shader, won't work with Daum. CRT-Geom (or simply "crt" with FS-UAE) has a couple of nice features more (overscan, corner smoothing...), compared with the CRT.D3D, but same mask, smoothing and scanlines.

With Daum you can use 5xBR shaders or the xBRZ scaler, whatever works better for you.

Originally Posted by guest.r

Edit2: Another fix, scaler should be set to none now.

It worked!
If you can do another exception , you could port to Dosbox fx the new gl-hires shader you came up with. I fell in love with that.
Why don't you pack all your shaders for these emulators and put them up on a page? So we won't keep going OT here and you'll get the glory you deserve (on second thought, you could be even more harassed by gamers like us!).

[guest.r]

OK i'll port it soon, i guess it will work as it should.

Edit: OK done porting. Scaler should be set to none. And don't forget it's tweakable.


@Photon:

But if it's to emulate CRT, there must be no horizontal pixel spacing as in the latest pictures. Pixels melting together horizontally but not vertically is what creates the scanlines. But maybe this can be turned off?

Yea most crt shaders have #define variables which can control horizontal or/and vertical blending.

crt-easymode:

#define SHARPNESS_H 0.5
#define SHARPNESS_V 1.0

crt-lottes-orig:

#define hardScan -8.0
#define hardPix -3.0
#define shape 2.0

crt-hyllian has horizontal sharpness hack etc.

In my experiance some degree of vertical blending is nice also as it cooperates with scanlines, but yeah, full strength vertical blending does really not feel right.

Originally Posted by guest.r

OK i'll port it soon, i guess it will work as it should.

Edit: OK done porting. Scaler should be set to none. And don't forget it's tweakable.

Great. This GL shader you came up with is wonderful: you can actually stare at the screen without your eyes bleeding AND without losing the CRT magic.
Thanks again.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by guest.r

OK i'll port it soon, i guess it will work as it should.

Edit: OK done porting. Scaler should be set to none. And don't forget it's tweakable.


@Photon:


Yea most crt shaders have #define variables which can control horizontal or/and vertical blending.

crt-easymode:

#define SHARPNESS_H 0.5
#define SHARPNESS_V 1.0

crt-lottes-orig:

#define hardScan -8.0
#define hardPix -3.0
#define shape 2.0

crt-hyllian has horizontal sharpness hack etc.

In my experiance some degree of vertical blending is nice also as it cooperates with scanlines, but yeah, full strength vertical blending does really not feel right.

All right, with the risk of you having posted a link before, where are the instructions for use/tweak of the zip on winuae.net?

Note this is in WinUAE not FS-UAE which should be almost the same but perhaps not exactly the same.

So I'm taking your advice. To just get "halfbrite scanlines aligned to verticaly lores pixels" (to start with), which mask and D3D shader should I select for

a) default windowed 720x568 resolution
b) fullscreen 1920x1080 resolution? (Also any aspect ratio tips for this one as it seemed to stretch a default config.)

And then I can go from there as a starting point. Cos I've tried a bunch of combinations and most do not yield a good picture in these resolutions.

[guest.r]

Originally Posted by Photon

All right, with the risk of you having posted a link before, where are the instructions for use/tweak of the zip on winuae.net?

Note this is in WinUAE not FS-UAE which should be almost the same but perhaps not exactly the same.

So I'm taking your advice. To just get "halfbrite scanlines aligned to verticaly lores pixels" (to start with), which mask and D3D shader should I select for

a) default windowed 720x568 resolution
b) fullscreen 1920x1080 resolution? (Also any aspect ratio tips for this one as it seemed to stretch a default config.)

And then I can go from there as a starting point. Cos I've tried a bunch of combinations and most do not yield a good picture in these resolutions.

Sorry about the instructions, the authors (Lottes, Easymode, Hyllian...) left us to discover the options mostly by ourselves and this isn't too hard in Retroarch since we can use the shader adjustment interface. (my shaders have most setting "hardcoded" lol). But the default settings are nice and if someone gets into the altering process, can be very interesting. I want only to let folks know that they can get geeky on this CRT thing.

About the scanline options in WinUAE. Yea basicly you can use masks or shaders for this and WinUAE favors some shaders more (gaussian scanlines for example - higher the scale, the better they look). So i wouldn't use a CRT shader for 720x568, because masks/scanlines makes a better job here.

In a 1080p situation shaders become a reasonable option since we usually want the image to have pixel-aligned scanlines. Masks also become viable, someone could perhaps create nicer 4x or 5x pixel perfect scanlines with manual integer scaling option.

I'm adding a gaussian scanline shader with some options to tweak and basic guidance to use, in fullscreen of course.