/vr/ - Retro Games

>>915975

I think they're a troll topic, and that you're wanting a punch in the mouth.

>>915981
That looks kind of neat.

>>915989
>>915981

Is there a way to remove the piss yellow?

Pure fucking faggotry.

>>915981
This works as an alternate visual style

>>915975
This looks like total shit

>>915993
You can use your own palette, including the Pocket's, which is more pleasing to the eye.

>>915989
It looks neat but I can't stand playing like that for more than a couple minutes. Just enough time to get a few screenshots and be done with it.

This is one of my current favorites. It smooths the pixels juuuuust a tiny bit without going overboard like bilinear does, and helps prevent scaling artifacts with with aspect ratio correction. Only possible downside is it has very slight scanlines, but they're hardly visible, especially on light colors. Also, while the horizontal size can be anything, the vertical size has to be an integer scale, or the scanlines go out of wack.

Perhaps a shader like this, without the scanlines, would be ideal for many video games, especially DOS games.

>>916443
>Perhaps a shader like this, without the scanlines,
You mean like the Pixellate filter?

http://hastebin.com/geduqajeye.xml

>>916460
Not quite. That helps with the scaling artifacts, but it's still too, well, pixellated for me. This shader employs only a very small amount of blur, which is ideal IMO.

>>916461
Employs it all around the image, that is. Pixellate only applies it to certain pixel edges to hide artifacts.

They are no substitute for a real CRT, because they do nothing to address sample-and-hold blur, and I personally dislike scanlines.

Filters are however necessary for playing games with a different pixel aspect than your display (eg. see pic).

>>916465
CRTs and shaders are not mutually exclusive.

>>915975

perfect! just as the developers intended.

>>915975
>enable fancy crt shader for muh authenticity
>still play in uncorrected aspect ratio

Please never post that picture again, OP.

>>915975

>>917342
>see this posted all the time on both /v/ and /vr/
>tfw I made that image

>>916465
>Filters are however necessary for playing games with a different pixel aspect than your display
More like, necessary for every single NES, SNES, and PC-Engine game ever made.

>>917070
This. I use a CRT shader on my CRT monitor to simulate 240p output (and interlacing)

they only make sense for big HD screens

A shader chain that xBR somewhere in it can make games look amazing

>>917430

That's just bilinear on the right.

>>917461
>xBR

No, that's fucking disgusting. Stop that.

>>917286

Is that an attempt at a shadowmask shader? Interesting. But nothing like my actual shadowmask TV.

>>917093

Trolling doesn't get you anywhere. You're exaggerating the NTSC effects to an absurd degree. Far more than anyone would ever do.

>>917281

I didn't make it.

>>917354
>>917342

Smoothing shaders are total garbage.

>>916435
>You can use your own palette, including the Pocket's, which is more pleasing to the eye.

That looks really nice.

>>917726
>Is that an attempt at a shadowmask shader? Interesting. But nothing like my actual shadowmask TV.
Hah. It's an actual picture of my Trinitron.

>>917726
>Trolling doesn't get you anywhere

It made me laugh.

>>917726
>>917741

Laughed my ass off. Good show, /vr/.

>>917741
>>917759

Because Trinitrons are Aperture grilles. I have a Shadowmask CRT. I personally don't like how Aperture grilles look.

they're neat and make me feel like i'm actually using a CRT

>>917726
>xBR
>disgusting

So you're one of those pixel purist hipsters I've heard about

I got a question. Do you not have to use CRT filters if you have a CRT?

I don't understand how people who hate shaders and filters so much put up with the sharp ass pixel edges, although I know many of the ones who rage are those who are vehemently against emulating in general.

I'm not gonna shout out "MUH ACCURACY" as much as I would "MY EYES".

The ones that smudge and shit are dumb, but the ones that blend the pixels like a television would aren't bad and CAN actually display the game in a way true to the original. Like the transparency in the waterfalls in Sonic the Hedgehog that, when emulated filterless, look like blue lines with spaces in between.

Novelty ones like the Gameboy shader are nice too. I played through Kid Dracula with it, and enjoyed it greatly.

>>917837

That depends. Are you using a CRT televison, a CRT monitor... what are you hooking it up with, etc.

>>917840
We live in a world where someone out there will recommend ZSNES with plain pixels as the height of emulation.

>>917837
On a CRT monitor, you'd still need the filters to make it look like a TV.

>>917847

Dell CRT monitor.

It looks great on its own. Im just not educated that much over CRTs.

Filter topics are cancer.

>>917430
>sit away from monitor like you were supposed to sit away from TV
>WOW YOUR EYES TURN ON THE BLUR FILTERS ON THEIR OWN

>>917889

Some people dont have shitty eyes.

What IS the best pixel blending filter/shader? I don't care about CRT filters and shit. I've been using bilinear which is okay because I sit a few feet back, but there are some areas that still look pretty rough.

>>917941
You mean to remove dithering and shit? Mdapt is what you're gonna want.

http://forum.themaister.net/viewtopic.php?id=493

Or do you mean something that will smooth the pixels out?

>>917947

I've tried mdapt, but it gets pretty bad with artifacts and false-positives, on some titles more than others.

I don't want something that'll smooth the pixels out, like xBR or the old Eagle filters or anything. I'm not looking for faux vectorization, just something that will make dithering not look like checkerboard hell and will knock some of the harshness off the edges of the pixels.

I just tried a bicubic shader but it didn't do anything that bilinear didn't. Lanczos left artifacts.

>>917970
This one >>916443 doesn't do much for dithering but it does smooth pixel edges just enough to not look like a blurry mess like bilinear or a ringing mess like Lanczos.

>>917941
The best filter is no filter.

filters are not bad sometimes

>>917869

I use a Dell CRT monitor and I use one of these shaders while displaying at 1280x960 for an authentic 240p look.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/6ygh7saafpn7gm0/CRT-Geom_for_CRT_monitors.7z

>>917987
This.

>>917987
>>918273

So you play only in 1x scale then?
Nearest neighbor is a filter too, you know. The most simple of them all, but it is.

>>917987

No. Nearest neighbor sucks for anything that isn't integer scaled square pixels.

Everybody has a different preference for stretching and smoothing and scanline emulation. Just pick whatever you like the most and shut up about everyone else. Me personally I like to play console and old PC games fullscreen on my widescreen monitor and I don't care about stupid perfect aspect ratio so I use CRT scanline emulation. So shoot me.

Proper 4:3 this time.

>mfw I can't get the goddamn shaders to work no matter what I do

it just keeps giving me a compilation error, probably because of my ancient graphics card.

>>918671

What emulator are you using, and what shader?

>>918679
snes9x, and it happens with any shader I try

>>918652
absolutely disgusting

>>918684

Try RetroArch. I could never get shaders to work in Snes9x.

>>918694

What's wrong?

>>918694

You do know that if you use it, you are to treat the screen as if it were an actual tv. You should put at least 4 feet of space between you and it. Don't sit at a desk.

>>918698
Why would you use such a shitty filter?

>>918652
Too blurry, and scanlines are too dark IMO.

>>918706

What's shitty about it? Looks like a proper 240p CRT to me

>>918652

Here's my variant that I'm using right now. This is the raw image.

>>918785
This is what it looks like on my 17-inch Dell CRT monitor.

>>918798
Lookin' good m8. I'm jelly.

>>915981
Ha, glad to see someone's still using my shader. I've actually gotten really into programming since then. I plan on updating that and my LCD shader once I get a break, should be able to improve them significantly (I had essentially no real experience back when I made those).

>>919509
Man, your shader has earned nothing but praise. Even the RetroArch devs have been showing it off left and right. It's one of the neatest shaders ever made.

Can't wait to see what else you cook up next.

Slightly modified version of crt-geom-interlaced-halation combined with an ntsc rgb filter.

>>919509
Man why haven't you been in emugen at all as of late?

>>919519
School, work, and my free time has been spent reading books on various programming languages/libraries/patterns and working on little projects. When I get into something I tend to just lose interest in everything else for a while and focus on that. Don't really have anything to contribute for now, anyways.

The DMG shader is pretty much done graphically as far as I'm concerned, although I'd like to maybe make it a little more user friendly to tweak and I think there's a lot of room for optimization. The LCD shader I've had some ideas for improving, that's a really tough one to get right visually, though. I have been tossing around some ideas for a CRT shader - not a typical "accurate" CRT representation, but an exaggerated kind image sort of like those close ups you see in old gaming magazines with tons of phosphorous glow. Mainly I want something that would make a home arcade cabinet look a lot more vibrant and give it more of an arcade-y feel. It's hard to tell if a lot of this stuff that you can envision perfectly in your mind will actually work out on a real monitor until you start playing around in Photoshop, though.

Finally my time to shine

>>919570
That actually looks better than all of the scanline garbage in this thread.

>>917840
Because in pixel art the sharp edges are part of the image.

>>918035
It looks best with sharp edges. I don't care about authenticity, I play these games for fun not for history education.

>>918319
There is no standard for number of subpixels per pixel, so this is false.

So I'm playing the Castlevania Adventure gameboy remake for the Wii, and the game is gorgeous but it appears my Wii adds bilinear filtering to it, which makes everything so muddy, and looking around in google it appears all the screenshots are in nearest neighbor (but maybe everyone is using Dolphin, I don't know)
Is there a way around this? I remember being able to change the PS2's texture filtering at least, so these things aren't completely unheard of.
Sorry if retro remakes aren't allowed on this board by the way.

>>915975
I usually like to see the unfiltered signal for ocd reasons, but one of puNES' GLSL shaders is really fun.

>>919570

what's this?

>>919651
Gives the impression of too much color separation with the wide magenta/cyan bands.

>>919509

Only thing I suggest is using gameboypocket pallette by default.

>>919651
>I usually like to see the unfiltered signal for ocd reasons,

Then you'd have to look at a tiny 320x240 image. And when displayed on a CRT screen
a NES game looks radically different. It doesn't have traditional "pixels" in the sense of little boxes. An LCD displays things radically different, especially if you scale it to fullscreen.
>>919610

Great Question. Ask emulation General. I've already posted your question.

>>>/vg/42041707

>>919895
If you scale it with integer ratio nearest neighbor it is unfiltered, because there is no single official number of subpixels per pixel. The pixels literally get bigger.

However, this is the incorrect way to display it, because NES games don't have the same aspect ratio as modern LCDs. Some filtering is unavoidable.

>>919895
If you scale it with integer ratio nearest neighbor it is unfiltered, because there is no single official number of subpixels per pixel. The pixels literally get bigger.

However, this is the incorrect way to display it, because NES games don't have the same pixel aspect as modern LCDs. Some filtering is unavoidable.

>>919916
>The pixels literally get bigger.

Which is very bad. What is sad is that people have even gotten used to it and think that it is how the game is "supposed to look". It's not. It's an artifact of emulation and modern HD screens.

>>919924
Mode 13h DOS games prove you wrong. Scanlines are the artifact.

>>919928
>Mode 13h DOS games prove you wrong. Scanlines are the artifact.

I don't know what those are. I do know that old DOS games were ran at low resolutions though. They shouldn't be ran in 1080p.

>>919928

Or what that has to do with "scanlines" per se. The power of CRTs is that they can use multiple resolutions, including very low resolutions. So they can display the game at its native resolution with no scaling. Scanlines are just the display technology that it has. The only benefit of a shadowmask is the slight blurring it gives. Very slight.

>>919652
Gears of War filter.

>>919930
>>919941
Mode 13h was the most popular VGA mode for games. It was not displayed at native resolution, it was line doubled, which made the scanlines almost invisible and the pixels clear and obvious.

However, mode 13h games used the exact same art techniques as console games, including dithered fake transparency. This image is a reasonably accurate representation of how it looked on original hardware.

>>917889
>sit away from TV
>sit away from TV
>sit away from TV

Who the hell did that, anon?

>>919961

Well, that's computers. I don't know computers. We're mostly talking about consoles.

But still, the game is being displayed at a pretty low resolution even if it is line doubled. It's not HD or anything. It's not a huge amount of scaling like we see with LCDs.

Also, I've noticed that many of these old DOS games have dithering. As a child I was puzzled by this, as they just looked like dots. It was only years later that I found out that you could actually use composite signals in computer monitors at one point. So I'm certain these games were designed with composite signals as an assumption. I don't know the details of old computer technology or when composite was phased out in favor of vga.

>>919961

They would look better non-line doubled, they were just too lazy to do it

>>920121
It would look worse, but fortunately the hardware didn't support that.

>>919928

Scanlines are not an "artifact" you fucking retard.

Line doubled 640x480 still has scanlines too you idiot, there are just twice as many of them.

>>920126
Scanline are obviously an artifact. The only reason they are so distinct on console games is because of the hack used to show 240p on a 480i display.

With line-doubled VGA on a 14" monitor (as was common at the time), the scanlines are extremely minor.

>>920125

No it wouldn't. I've played games both line doubled and native and native simply looks more natural and less blocky. This is especially obvious with 3D PS1 games.

>>920139
>This is especially obvious with 3D PS1 games.

Obviously 3D graphics look better with anti-aliasing, and native res. CRT provides a crude form of anti-aliasing. But the whole point of pixel art is that there is by definition no aliasing, because the pixel edges are an intended part of the image. No anti-aliasing filter is needed. Pixel art looks best with minimal filtering (preferably none, but some may be required because of different pixel aspect).

>>920135
>Scanline are obviously an artifact

It's part of the image on CRT displays. It's like film grain on 16mm film stock.

The only reason they did line doubled mode on VGA because it was easier to than to run at a native resolution, not because it "looks better" It's rather difficult to get 240p out of VGA CRT monitors that are 32khz instead of 15khz

>>920135

>>920154
>pixel edges are an intended part of the image

This is totally opinion. From what I've seen, pixel art looks better when it is more like dots instead of squares (ie at native 240p res).

>>917093
I love you anon.

>>919961
>Zsnes
why

>>920180

huh?

>>920159
Film grain is shit too. Also vinyl surface noise, tube amp distortion, "film look" low framerate, and every other form of failure you fucking hipsters pretend is good because of MUH AUTHENTICITY.

>>915981
This looks pretty damn awesome.

>>920192

If you hate old stuff so much, why the fuck are you here?

Get the fuck out of here poser.

>>916438
It's nice for creating some cool wallpapers.

>>920192
>Film grain is shit too.

It looks fine. And you can't remove it without doing serious harm to the movies.

>>915981
Are there any android emulator that does this? On a big screen it probably looks eye-stressing, but on an android phone (with buttons) it probably looks damn good.

>>920201
Just because I hate some specific aspects of old technology doesn't mean I hate old games in general. In fact old games are often technically superior to modern games in framerate and control latency.

Also, fuck interlacing too, I forgot to mention that earlier.

>>920210
>Are there any android emulator that does this? On a big screen it probably looks eye-stressing, but on an android phone (with buttons) it probably looks damn good.

It's meant for RetroArch, which is also for Android. Although Android isn't the best system for emulation at all.

>>918035

bsnes no filter looks best.

The lines you guys give Megaman, Metroid, and Yoshi to simulate having a bad tv give me a literal headache.

>>920229

Sit back about 5 feet, it looks perfectly fine.

>>920229

It looks like a bit kinda like Aperture grille tvs. Most people had and still have shadowmask tvs.

>>920250
>Sit back about 5 feet, it looks perfectly fine.

This is so important. No one does it.

>>920268
>This is so important. No one does it.

I've always sit back far enough to have all of the screen in my field of vision. I've never understood people who sit 2 feet from the screen, it makes everything look worse (anything, not just CRT shadered retro games) and half the screen is in your peripheral vision so you don't see everything.

>>920312
>I've never understood people who sit 2 feet from the screen,

PC Gamers. People are emulating games on the PC and treat it like a PC game.

>>920315

I'm a PC gamer but I never do that.

>>920223
I know it's not, but it should be more than enough for just GB games.

>>919961
If I may ask, what is the filter used in that shot?

>>920345

Most Android devices have weak GPUs that are not capable of running advanced shaders like that one.

>>919961

Also, holy shit what filter is that in that shot? It's close to what I've been looking for.

>there are people on /vr/ who like pixellated messes more than properly filtered graphics

>>920371

This is bait.

>>920359
That's not any emulator's filter, that's nearest neighbor integer ratio followed by ImageMagick's default resize filter to correct the aspect ratio followed by slight gaussian blur to simulate the poor quality of the original hardware. Can't remember what colorspace I used.

Why do SNES9x's NTSC filters cause immense amount of lag and stuttering?

>>920381
>That's not any emulator's filter, that's nearest neighbor integer ratio followed by ImageMagick's default resize filter to correct the aspect ratio followed by slight gaussian blur to simulate the poor quality of the original hardware. Can't remember what colorspace I used.

You should turn that into a filter though.

>>920371
That kind of filtering could work much better if there was an emulator that let you apply filters to each layer and to a pseudo-layer made up of all the sprites individually.

>>920380
Because they run on CPU, so they take more CPU cycles. If you get slowdown with them, your CPU is probably too weak to handle them.

>>920380
>Why do SNES9x's NTSC filters cause immense amount of lag and stuttering?

Might be that your GPU is not good enough.

>>920383
NTSC filters run on CPU, not GPU.

>>920381
Damn it. I was looking for a filter that applies only like a pixel of blur just to smooth out pixel edges the slightest bit without going overboard like fucking bilinear does.

>>920383

But it runs more processing-intensive shaders just fine.

>>920390
>Damn it. I was looking for a filter that applies only like a pixel of blur just to smooth out pixel edges the slightest bit without going overboard like fucking bilinear does.

Does Pixilate do that?

>>920389

Maybe Snes9x sucks, who knows.

Try NTSC filters in RetroArch snes9x, and see if it makes a difference.

>>920390
I think you could acheive a similar effect using simple2x+bilinear in retroarch

>>920393
Nearest neighbor integer ratio 3x or 4x, followed by bilinear. I hacked MAME to do this, was a very simple modification because the nearest neighbor software scaling code is already there.

>>919895
By unfiltered I mean what the simplest representation of what the software puts out.

>>919895
>I've already posted your question.
Thank you, I appreciate it.

>>920402

You probably could make a cgp that scales with stock to 3x then does bicubic to scale to 4x.

>>920390
bilinear filtering "lessens" the higher the resolution you run at

>>917093
just like my upscaled chinese cartoons

Does anyone have a link to that DMG filter? I really want to try it out.

>>921493
Wait, I might already have it.
Is it called gb-shader.cgp?

>>918035
that bsnes color pallet looks superior, as does overall image quality
worst offender is that zsnes ntsc filter, that looks like pure shit
neither of these surprise me thou

>tfw you HAVE to use bilinear filtering on some things because of screen squash
Go to hell, CPS2 resolution.

>>922326
Use Pixellate. It should work for that.

>>921421
How would you go about doing this?

>>922356
...you want someone to explain to you how to create your own shaders in a post? There's literally entire books dedicated to writing shaders.

>>920002
A lot of dithering wasn't designed with the idea of blurring or distorting it together in mind at all. Developers just worked with it to allow higher color count where resolution allowed it.

I think stylized dithering like this looks extremely good.

Is there some kind of HDMI or USB to AV cable so that you can hook a laptop or computer into an old fashioned TV?

>>923250
No. If you must, a converter or old ass graphics card (with S-video out or some shit) is required.
I just stick with a CRT monitor. Which allows higher resolutions as well.

>>923230

The kind the Mega Drive used really was though

>>915993
its green

>>923230
Superior shading

>>923230
I think there's room for multilayer filtering.

>>923230
>Developers just worked with it to allow higher color count where resolution allowed it.

You realize that works because of the aforementioned blurring, right? That's a high-res example; on something of the Genesis's or SNES's resolution, dithering doesn't look very good on HD displays.

>>925132
It's like I have fucking cataracts

>>919961
I had to compare this to the shader I use.

Goddamn, this game really abuses dithering.

>>925304
And I just realized I took that screenshot in the exact same place. I didn't even mean to, I just stopped in a place that looked like it had a lot of dithering to take it. Talk about convenient.

>>919947
Cannot find anything on the Google. Got a link?

>>925441
Pretty sure he was joking. That looks like a bunch of Photoshop filters stacked on top of each other.

>>925154
Nope. That's PC98, and there's no blurring for that whatsoever. If I recall correctly, there's even PCXX laptops with digital screens.
It works because they're near other colors in the relevant pattern. Blurring isn't required.

And I disagree. Dithering looks extremely good even on LCDs, but only at native resolution. Which is likely to be a tiny window.
When you blow it up with bilinear or some shit it's not going to look right.
The term "HD displays" is rather confusing though. Because most CRT monitors are also "HD displays", but they can output low resolutions as well just fine.

>>925132
But why? Why filter it like that? You can still see the dithering plain as day, and that blur simply hurts.

>>920387
Agreed. Would be heavy as hell I guess but not impossible. To work 100% accurately it would have to render the screen eight separate times in one 60th of a second, but since most games (with the notable exception of Super Mario Kart) use only two 4bpp FGs, one 2bpp Layer 3, one sprite layer and mode 7, it would be only five.
Maybe on multi-core processors.

>>918785
Is that JUST scanlines and gamma correction? Where can I get this?

>>925719
I'm pretty sure it's the "sharper" variant of CRT-Geom posted here:

http://emulation-general.wikia.com/wiki/CRT_Shaders

How bad am I /vr/? I can't stand scanlines, and I can't stand nearest neighbor, and bilinear filtering looks ugly as hell if the image is blown up too big

>>925763
Maybe the Quilez shader might be what you're looking for. Blurs the image a bit, but not as much as bilinear.

>>925770
Theres no way to get it on Nestopia huh? Retroarch is problematic as fuck for me

>>925771
Nope. And it's the other way around for me. I get nasty screen tearing and stutter on Nestopia proper, and smooth video and audio on RetroArch.

How do I get that gameboy shader to work with retroarch? Its just doing flat out nothing when I goto "set shader" and choose it from retroarch-pheonix.

>>925798
>How do I get that gameboy shader to work with retroarch? Its just doing flat out nothing when I goto "set shader" and choose it from retroarch-pheonix.

Ask emulation General
>>>/vg/Emulation

just wait until we have monitors with this kind of resolution.

>>926610
But that's essentially what your LCD monitor already is if you look really close? Why do you want to emulate and LCD on your LCD?

>>926709
"Subpixels" aren't lit evenly on CRTs, you can have multiple scanlines lighting different parts of a single subpixel.

To represent this on a LCD you have to have multiple pixels for each simulated "subpixel" and even then it won't look as good until 120hz 4K OLED displays.

>>928413
If you're using black frame insertion, LCD with strobed LED backlight is better than OLED because of superior brightness.

>>926579
>Cant ask questions about how to get shaders to work in a shader thread
suck a fuck bro

xBR is the best shader, fuck the haters

>>928672
It is terrible as a shader due to shading the entire screen instead of layers, causing blending between things that shouldn't be blended (like sprites+backgrounds). But it does a good job at texture scaling for 3D games. Especially on metallic textures.

The best shader overall is SMAA or FXAA for 6th gen.
The best shader for 2D entirely depends on the game and the resolution you're running it at.

>>928692
>The best shader overall is SMAA or FXAA for 6th gen.
>The best shader for 2D entirely depends on the game and the resolution you're running it at.
>my opinions are fact

>>929540
At no point was anything stated as anything more than an opinion in either that post or the one before it. Please stop.

>>929978
>backtracking

>/vr/ - Shaders and Filters
Jesus fuck, /vr/. Every other thread now.

>>930034
Oh, stop exaggerating.