Virtual monitor that emulators can connect to

[Waxhead]

Howdy,I have had an idea for a while that I would like to spread (one more) in the hope that someone eventually get the taste of blood and implements it.

Currently lots of emulators such as *UAE, DosBox, Vice, MAME and others implement and hence duplicate more or less the same thing. E.g. a display/monitor with different scalers, CRT effects and miscellaneous snacks (aspect ratio) that make us old timers happy.

Would it not have been great if the various emulators we love could connect to a "display server", a virtual monitor/tv/display where the same visual preset could be applied to for example both UAE and Vice? e.g. where you set the scaler you want once and you set the scanline options you like once and it "just works" no matter what emulator connects to it?

(Of course in practice you would probably want to have the thing accept individual adjustments based on which emulator connects to it etc, but that is not the point of this post - the point is that all the options you like scalers like RGBx2, SAIx2, SuperEagle etc would all be available to ALL emulators)

Yes, I do realize that each emulator is different and that the display hardware they emulate is also quite different, and that such a thing can be quite difficult to implement and also quite CPU/bandwidth hungry compared to having it embedded into the emulator. Latency would be another issue , but I still would like to throw this idea out there into the public domain in the hopes that someone tries to do something about this.

[Anubis]

Creating something that people building emulators could use to place emulators in the same framework... something like RetroArch and then use cores for each emulators... such a great idea...

And then you can use the same settings for each of those different emulators, not just monitors and filters, but also gamepad setup, etc...

It would be also cool if someone builds single front end for such thing... like.. Launchbox

[giantclam]

Kinda like this... https://github.com/itsmikethetech/Vi...Display-Driver

[dreadnought]

Not exactly OP's idea, but does similar things: https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass