/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5798967]

Does /vr/ use shaders when emulating retro games?

[Anonymous No.5799003]

>>5798967
Mostly tvout+interlacing on a PC CRT

[Anonymous No.5799096]

>>5798967

Yes. Its the first thing I enable, either via Retroarch or Reshade.

I get fucking annoyed when there are no options to enable CRT-scanlines-aperture grille in a particular game

[Anonymous No.5799113]

>>5798967
I do. It's a matter of personal taste. I like it to at least feel kind of like a CRT, even if it's not perfect. Plus it's fun to just fool around with different shaders on different games.

[Anonymous No.5799115]

No if I wanted scanlines I would just play on a CRT.

[Anonymous No.5799143]

>>5799113
Looks like some of that awful analog shader pack shit. There are way less offensive vaseline-tier options, anon.

[Anonymous No.5799162]

>>5798967
Yes, and pretty much refuse to play any other way.

[Anonymous No.5799168]

>>5799113
Using any kind of shader to do geometry correction is foolishness. When you are looking a curved screen CRT you don't perceive it as being curved like that. And the light it emits doesn't go off in the same direction like your LCD does either.

Best to stick to light shader effects. Just enough to put some texture back into the image.

[Anonymous No.5799174]

>>5799168
>When you are looking a curved screen CRT you don't perceive it as being curved like that
I don't use curved meme shaders like that anon, but that's a silly statement. Smaller CRTs are very curvy.

[Anonymous No.5799214]

>>5799174
Yes, but when you are actually looking at them and playing them you don't see the screen as being curved. Your brain corrects this.
When you play with geometry shaders the correction never kicks in, or even if it does it was never necessary in the first place.

[Anonymous No.5799220]

>>5799214
I have that CRT on my desk right next to my other monitors, I assure you that your brain doesn't magically "correct" the image. The only difference is that the photos heavily wash out the image because I can't adjust the exposure settings on my phone. The closer you sit to the screen, the more you can see how the image sort of "rolls" over the curve in sidescrollers. On my big CRT, or just sitting several feet away, you won't notice it.

[Anonymous No.5799242]

>>5799220
I just had a go in RetroArch using CRT-Royale+TV outs and turned on the geometry parameter.
It's not so bad really.

[Anonymous No.5799253]

>>5799113
>>>5798967 (OP)
>I do. It's a matter of personal taste. I like it to at least feel kind of like a CRT, even if it's not perfect. Plus it's fun to just fool around with different shaders on different games.

Just my answer.

[Anonymous No.5799665]

>>5799214
the human brain doesn't work even remotely like that. are you retarded?

[Anonymous No.5799765]

>>5799168
>When you are looking a curved screen CRT you don't perceive it as being curved like that.
That's how it works when playing a game with that shader applied too. You're looking at a screenshot, so it's more noticeable.

[Anonymous No.5800165]

>>5798967
I don't use any filters because they look stupid to me but I upscale the resolution and stretch it to 16:9 so that is probably worse.

[Anonymous No.5800187]

>>5800165
>Filters look stupid
>I stretch the image to 16:9
You no longer get to have an opinion on what looks stupid. I mean ever.

[Anonymous No.5800276]

>>5800165
Yeah, that terrible thing is definitely worse than that decent thing.

[Anonymous No.5800346]

>>5800187
>>5800276
yeah guess I'm a pleb but meme filters are gay and the retro equivalent to 'film grain' and all those other modern post processing effects.

[Anonymous No.5800353]

>>5800346
If there's a way to add film grain back to a film after it's been stripped out the moronic company producing the blu-ray, I'd happily do that, even if it still doesn't look as good as the original. Your comparison's fine. It's just your taste and judgement that sucks.

[Anonymous No.5800357]

If I didn't have actual CRTs maybe I would, but if I'm ever that desperate for muh scanlines I just play on a real CRT. There's nothing wrong with sharp ass pixels properly scaled on a flt screen

[Anonymous No.5800365]

>>5799174
The point isn't the physical geometry of the screen surface, it's the way the raster electronics draw the image. On a real CRT, the hardware is designed with the curved screen surface in mind and projects in such a way that the resulting image *doesn't* demonstrate this warping, especially if tuned right. The difference is most geometry shaders actually bend the edges of the image. This simply isn't how it behaves on a real tube. The electron gun is at a fixed location and fires at a fixed frequency, so by scanning across a curved surface like the inside of a tube, it actually maintains a relatively constant distance and time-of-flight from the gun to the incident phosphors. Notice how you see a bit of overscan on just the middle of the image, that's because the image is "flat" relative to the viewing angle and specifically accounts for the curvature of the screen.

[Anonymous No.5800839]

>>5798967
>>5799113
>>5799174
>>5799220
This looks fucking terrible, why would you want to play like this anymore?

[Anonymous No.5800847]

>>5798967
>>5799113
The thing is that's not how CRTs look IRL. That's how they look if you try to take a pic of them.

[Anonymous No.5800848]

>>5798967
Depends on the system and the game.

[Anonymous No.5800870]

Sometimes I enjoy playing in simulated RF crap-vision.

[Anonymous No.5801180]

>>5800870
Even that at least looks like RF into a proper working CRT, my first color TV as a kid had a lot of burn in and washed out color
Used that thing until it would only display red because holy shit I have a TV right here in my room and can play my NES games whenever I want

[Anonymous No.5801191]

>>5800839
based and carmackpilled

[Anonymous No.5802094]

never used them before
what shaders do you recommend bros?

[Anonymous No.5802673]

>>5802094
GTU with scanlines turned off.

[Anonymous No.5802704]

>>5800870
45yr old here even back in the 80's no one i knew had such a shitty tv image like this.
You guys are all retards.

[Anonymous No.5802935]

>>5802094
i use the one that looks good. sometimes I don't though because I can't. My favorite is a secret.

[Anonymous No.5802995]

>>5802704
Fucking finally, someone else says it. I thought I was going crazy or something. I don't remember blurry shit from my childhood NES-on-CRT memories, I remember pixels.

[Anonymous No.5803020]

>>5802935
Please tell me I BEG YOU

[Anonymous No.5803412]

>>5802704
I did. It actually looked worse than this.

[Anonymous No.5803421]

>>5798967
I have been using TV-Out+interlacing. I then manually go in and make these changes

>halation effects OFF
>-5 R 0 G +5 B Horizontal convergence
>+5 R 0 G - 5 B Vertical convergence
>film grain 18
>little extra saturation
>little extra contrast
>target gamma 2.40
>CRT gamma 2.35
>red gain +0.05
Then I adjust mask type to shadow mask and give it very big triads, can't remember exact settings. Then I apply geometry correction to give the screen a slight simulated curve like >>5799113
/vr/ may hate this but I say don't knock it until you honest try it. I was skeptical at first too.

What I end up with is something that feels like I'm looking at a consumer tier shadow mask composite video CRT. It doesn't look identical by a long shot, but the spirit is there. And somehow that makes all the difference for a lot of games. Since I have started playing like this I have been spending longer periods of time actually playing games and enjoying them than I used to.

[Anonymous No.5803431]

>>5803020
tee hee

No no no.
Hint:it's not supereagle anymore

[Anonymous No.5803535]

>>5802704
>>5802995
The operative part of his post I think is "RF." Those things are garbage at transmitting video signal. Puts everything into a big static-y blender. You probably grew up using A/V cables.

[Anonymous No.5803671]

>>5803421
s o u l

[Anonymous No.5803727]

>>5803671
Yes, something like that although sometimes I back the film grain aka noise back down to 12. 12 is composite, 18 is RF.

[Anonymous No.5804246]

>>5798967
Not like that.
For 8 and 16 I use bilinear filtering, for everything else I just leave whatever is in the default settings.
I fucked around a bit with some goofy filters in Mesen but got sick of them. Emulated scanlines always bother me if I'm playing on PC, I find them too distracting on the whole even if individual sprites and screens might technically look better. I always turn them off eventually.

[Anonymous No.5804269]

>>5804246
>bilinear
ugh. total groan zone

[Anonymous No.5804286]

For 3D games, I'll freely admit to using all sorts of antialiasing and upscaling because I like my 3D visuals *clean* so to speak, as long as the emu allows it.

For 2D and pixel art games, I only use a touch of bilinear filtering if scaling is uneven, and maybe some form of composite blending to mask dithering. memelines are for fags

[Anonymous No.5804290]

>>5804269
Enjoy your pixel shimmering from uneven scaling.

[Anonymous No.5804304]

When is bilinear filtering acceptable in your opinion /vr/? It's the only filter I use except for the occasional NTSC filter I use for when the color gamut is off.

Pic unrelated.

[Anonymous No.5804309]

>>5804290
No shimmering here, fren. It just works.

[Anonymous No.5804314]

>>5804269
don't give a shit what you think
I've tried a variety and this is just the most natural to me. Games just feel right and I don't notice any issues. Without it, it feels like I'm playing on an emulator. Other shaders just look weird and can be fun to mess around with but that's it.

[Anonymous No.5804321]

>>5804314
>the default setting on shitty emulators makes you feel like you aren't playing on an emulator
what did he mean by this???

[Anonymous No.5804324]

>>5804309
God that looks so fucking bizarre.
I really can't handle playing with shit like that on for any length of time. It's nothing remotely like playing on a real CRT.

[Anonymous No.5804330]

>>5804321
What I meant to say was that you appear to spend more time sucking cocks than playing games.

[Anonymous No.5804331]

>>5804324
It's nothing remotely like playing on a consumer SDTV, but it is like playing on a gross broadcast meme monitor.

[Anonymous No.5804342]

It depends. I default to using none and sticking with it if it looks alright. If there's a lot of jarring pixelation, I'll use bilinear. Scanlines work pretty well for prerendered assets that don't play nice with modern displays.

[Anonymous No.5804381]

>>5798967
I used to, but ultimately those shaders will never be able to perfectly replicate the look. So I might as well just play them with sharp pixels, since that's how those games naturally look on an LCD monitor.

I wish I weren't broke living in a tiny house with my parents goddamn it, I want a CRT.

[Anonymous No.5804384]

>>5800870
>RF
Fucking god, those were dark times. Fuck RF modulators. My dad broke the cable thing on the back of his TV in the early 00s because the NES's RF modulator output thing was massive and screwed off his poor little cable input.

[Anonymous No.5804389]

>boomers who can't tell good from bad pixel art think they're entitled to having an opinion on how games are supposed to look
cringe

[Anonymous No.5804393]

>>5804290
>he doesn't use integer scaling only

[Anonymous No.5804398]

>>5804393
>integer scaling
>not stretching to monitor's native res and slathering it in bilinear vaseline
get a load of this goober

[Anonymous No.5804443]

>>5804309
>ha see this still image doesn't have shimmering artifacts seen in motion!
>memeline intensity that looks nothing like a consumer or pro monitor
Does your handler let you dress yourself?
You're kind of retarded)

[Anonymous No.5804450]

>>5804443
I dunno buddy, looks an awful lot like >>5804331 to me. Also it doesn't have shimmering artifacts in motion. Your irrational anger and obsession with these "shimmering artifacts" that don't exist with proper scaling is unhealthy. Take your meds, fren.

[Anonymous No.5804452]

>>5804393
I'm too autistic to have black borders around the image

[Anonymous No.5804460]

>>5804398
Mmmm...retro video games baby!

[Anonymous No.5804463]

>>5804460
333% soul

[Anonymous No.5804471]

Usually I go with clear pixels but otherwise unironically the only ones I like are the Super Eagle type filters. I hate CRTs and filters that try to emulate them.

[Anonymous No.5804484]

Honestly, I will never understand why people are so desperate to reproduce inferior imagery when we have superior screens. Is this the same thing that drives people to buy vinyl records?

I can appreciate creative tricks like sending fucked video signals to fake more colour or patterns to fake transparency, but for the vast majority of games, I just want to see them clearly, even if that means Lego sized pixels.

[Anonymous No.5804486]

>>5804471
If you're going to meme it up with that kind of filter, use scalefx instead. It mangles the image far less.

[Anonymous No.5804489]

>>5804450
>looks an awful lot like >>5804331 # to me.
In other words, your eyes are broken and don't know what a CRT looks like.
>get called out about artifacts
>NUH UH UR MAD
Why are you so defensive about terms you don't understand? Uneven scaling produces shimmering, light bilinear filtering can hide it. Hope you aren't scaling those memelines unevenly either.

[Anonymous No.5804494]

>>5804489
I think that bilinear shitfiltering has damaged your brain, anon.

[Anonymous No.5804512]

>>5804471
SuperEagle is old hat bro, use xBR.
http://www.snes9x.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?t=15191

[Anonymous No.5804516]

>>5804484
Some people prefer the old, blurrier, and therefore smoother image style

[Anonymous No.5805442]

>>5804484
In my opinion the games were designed to benefit from noise and color bleed, and I'm not just talking about dot crawl in Famicom games or transparencies in Megadrive. Even the PlayStation and N64 benefit from it.
I have owned and extensively used 15khz RGB monitors and eventually I went back to composite because of this.

[Anonymous No.5806404]

For people who DO use shaders: Is there a better universal shader than CRT-Royale, or is that still the most recommended one?

[Anonymous No.5806408]

>>5806404
There's delusional and vocal GTUfrens, but royale variants are the gold standard of crt shaders.

[Anonymous No.5806413]

>>5806408
Thought as much. I tried a bunch of others but they seemed so weird, randomly blown-out purples or things like that - I don't even know who most of these shaders are aimed at. Maybe they're just for specific games.
Anyway, cheers.

[Anonymous No.5806425]

mmm don't mind if I do!