Reply To: Help Needed: Need some overlays to be tested

[patrickm]

[quote=97390]You should not set up a Y resolution higher then the screen resolution.
I use 1080p because then i have 4 pixels for each scanline and additional enough pixel for the TV border itself.
I still don’t know what you mean with warped pixels on the X axis.
I can’t see any difference between 1194×896 and 960×720
You’re right the exact aspect ratio is 1194.66666 in the X axis but with 1194 every emulated pixel is 4,6640625 pixels on screen, not 1, in practice i can’t see the difference, especially with the scanlines[/quote]

Having spent a LOT of time with this, and talking with various RA devs, I thought I should share what I’ve learned.

Why should you not set a y resolution higher than the screen resolution? As I said, what gets cropped off is so minimal on SNES or Genesis that it would have been cropped off by a CRT anyway. With NES, it may seem like you’re losing a lot, but actually, the “safe zone” for CRTs was 90% of the total picture. With going to 1200 on the y axis, you lose 120 pixels, which at a scale of 5x translates to 24 NES pixels. The NES put out a total of 240 lines. 240 – 24 = 216, or 90%.

You might not notice the artifacts on the x axis because they are small at the resolution you’ve chosen, but they are there. Look at the mini map in the upper right of the screen on Super Metroid. You will notice some individual pixels are wider than others. You probably didn’t notice because most of the warping occurs at the edges as you get closer to integer scale. Scaling artifacts completely ruin the image for me, so getting rid of them is my top priority. Or check out the first hill in super Mario bros at the title screen, at the diagonal edge line. You will see inconsistently-sized pixels.

Would you mind providing a screenshot?

[quote]Also most shader have either more or less recognizable effects on the emulator speed. For example SNES Yoshis Island first level, first cave.
The sharp-bilinear.glsl do nothing at least on my tests.
Instead i use the video_smooth option in the retroarch.cfg.
The same with the pixellate filter.[/quote]

The very purpose of the pixelate shader is to allow you to keep your 4:3 aspect ratio while eliminating scaling artifacts. Sharp-bilinear adds a very slight horizontal blur to deal with artifacts on the x axis. You wouldn’t notice them doing anything if you already are not noticing the artifacts in your picture.

Video smooth should be avoided as it just adds bilinear filter, which causes blurring and a loss of detail. You would need a broken CRT for it to look like the picture with bilinear filter. Most videophile retro gamers will advise you to avoid using it.

[quote]In my opinion the pixel edges and the scaliness itself in your example looks too sharp and too dark for me, it looks not really realistic.[/quote]

I don’t want to get into a battle over opinions, if you have found a look that makes you happy, great.

I don’t really see what you mean by too dark, are you sure your display is properly calibrated? I put the scanlines at 50% for an effective 25% reduction in brightness, so you need to turn the backlight up to 100% on your display for an effective 75% backlight.

Realistic isn’t really possible without CRT shaders, but even those just wind up looking fake to me most of the time, and most don’t work on the raspberry pi. For the pi, I just go for a clean emulated look with scanlines to soften the edges a bit. Actually, this picture is almost indistinguishable from a high end Sony BVM :) It’s also very similar to using an upscaler with original hardware. The “softness” of a consumer grade CRT was due to flaws in its manufacture. An ideal “perfect” CRT with no manufacturing flaws would indeed look like the above shot, but brighter, and the scanlines would be 100% black and sharp.

Most of the time when people go for “authentic” it just looks fake and distracting to me. I’m going for overall picture quality over authenticity. I never really understood why people went for authenticity over quality. If you want authentic, why not just play on an old CRT? Can’t get any more authentic than that, and you can get one for free these days. Trying to replicate all the flaws of a CRT on an LCD is silly to me.

[quote]My TV border isn’t 100% finished yet, it’s a bit too much curved, so in some games too much of important image details are lost, but i like it ?

Here you can download some fullscreen scanline overlays and another with a TV Border
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sicv3m5yp7ztg7u/AAAoJH6AxlKmvWKyAAMGSu8ja?lst

And here is the Youtube Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu5lLfJmJVY

[/quote]

Thanks! I’ll check those out, as I’m still having trouble getting my overlay the right size. I figured out how to do transparency, at least.