Demul scanlines

[Dogway]

Sorry, I couldn't respond yesterday because I reached the stupid forum post limit.

As for the shader, I'm with you, well actually I don't quite buy the built in crt effect. Mostly anything from the retro guys is better. I know that Boulotaur2024 posted a port here but the link is down, it was the crt-cgwg shader which is fairly good, it was the previous version of crt-geom-flat, this is how it looks. I will try to find it elsewhere or simply ask if somebody still have it.

SweetFX can do good scanlines but requires a lot of fiddling, and a certain resolution. On demul with internal resolution of x1 I was getting crap scanlines, when I increased that to x2 then it was very good, the problem I have and I don't know if I'm alone on this, is that setting resolution to x2 makes the game go ultra slow, I don't know why.

[Rick74]

Sorry, I couldn't respond yesterday because I reached the stupid forum post limit.

As for the shader, I'm with you, well actually I don't quite buy the built in crt effect. Mostly anything from the retro guys is better. I know that Boulotaur2024 posted a port here but the link is down, it was the crt-cgwg shader which is fairly good, it was the previous version of crt-geom-flat, this is how it looks. I will try to find it elsewhere or simply ask if somebody still have it.

SweetFX can do good scanlines but requires a lot of fiddling, and a certain resolution. On demul with internal resolution of x1 I was getting crap scanlines, when I increased that to x2 then it was very good, the problem I have and I don't know if I'm alone on this, is that setting resolution to x2 makes the game go ultra slow, I don't know why.

I don't know if anyone can use Demul at 2x internal resolution... It's just too demanding...

I have the same issue... The scanlines plain suck using SweetFX at 1x resolution. I tried copying and pasting and editing RetroArch shaders for a while yesterday, but all that is way over my head...

Please, if you find a working scanline shader, post it here...

[Dogway]

I was having issues at 2x at the beginning, but yesterday testing with sweetFX it was running ok *without shaders* but slow with them.

As long as shaders go, I think it wants hlsl style shaders, I have a bunch of them in a folder, but they have a coding style that is not suited for sweetfx, cg shaders being glsl if I'm not wrong look more what sweetFX wants, but I don't know. Maybe a shader guru can come here and tell, I don't want to bother anyone.

Try to look for the cgwg shader if you can. You would need to copy it to the cutom.h file, and enable in sweetfx settings.

[Rick74]

I was having issues at 2x at the beginning, but yesterday testing with sweetFX it was running ok *without shaders* but slow with them.

As long as shaders go, I think it wants hlsl style shaders, I have a bunch of them in a folder, but they have a coding style that is not suited for sweetfx, cg shaders being glsl if I'm not wrong look more what sweetFX wants, but I don't know. Maybe a shader guru can come here and tell, I don't want to bother anyone.

Try to look for the cgwg shader if you can. You would need to copy it to the cutom.h file, and enable in sweetfx settings.

The android port of RetroArch uses glsl shaders... if that helps.

[Dogway]

The android port of RetroArch uses glsl shaders... if that helps.

Yes IIRC RA works with glsl shaders now universally, they dropped the other formats.

[AshuraX]

Thanks guys! We need to find the best Crt config for our emulators

[Rick74]

In Sweet FX shader folder, there is a 'SweetCRT.h' shader..

You'll have to add

#define USE_SWEETCRT

in the SweetFX settings.text to enable it, but it looks pretty good... It's a wip, so it's just scanlines right now, but it's 1000% better than anything else right now that I can get working with Demul...Maybe this with some bloom will look good

[Dogway]

in the SweetFX settings.text to enable it, but it looks pretty good... It's a wip, so it's just scanlines right now, but it's 1000% better than anything else right now that I can get working with Demul...Maybe this with some bloom will look good

For me it looks pretty much like vanilla sweetFX, except if I increase internal resolution to 2x which make scanlines better, but then game is slow (and GPU just heats up all the way).

[Rick74]

I think you might be doing it wrong... For me, it's night and day... At 1x resolution

I'll try to take screenshots later

[Dogway]

Sorry Rick74, my wrong. It looks quite good, it doesn't wrap pixels as native scanlines do, but paired with the other sweetfx options is quite nice.

Here my try:

http://www.mediafire.com/view/d7fz3743cjn2jrx/SweetFX_settings.txt

[Rick74]

Sorry Rick74, my wrong. It looks quite good, it doesn't wrap pixels as native scanlines do, but paired with the other sweetfx options is quite nice.

Here my try:

http://www.mediafire.com/view/d7fz3743cjn2jrx/SweetFX_settings.txt

I hope there's more work done to this SweetCRT because this looks promising...

Not as good as scanlines in RetroArch... Maybe we can get someone to port their simple scanline shader

[Dogway]

Updated the post with the images, I wanted to be more subtle with vignetting but no matter what I tweak it doesn't soften the effect. btw, that game is top fun.

edit: I think Rick74, that "AdvancedCRT" is indeed cgwg's shader. Just look at the shader on notepad. What it really looks like is that of a stripped down version, because despite looking like a 1 to 1 conversion, some things are missing like the aforementioned sampler2D call. That might be an OpenGL feature, remember SweetFX runs on DX so to do the neat things cgwg's shader does it would need a major rewrite. Although on the screens it doesn't look too bad :/

[Rick74]

Updated the post with the images, I wanted to be more subtle with vignetting but no matter what I tweak it doesn't soften the effect. btw, that game is top fun.

edit: I think Rick74, that "AdvancedCRT" is indeed cgwg's shader. Just look at the shader on notepad. What it really looks like is that of a stripped down version, because despite looking like a 1 to 1 conversion, some things are missing like the aforementioned sampler2D call. That might be an OpenGL feature, remember SweetFX runs on DX so to do the neat things cgwg's shader does it would need a major rewrite. Although on the screens it doesn't look too bad :/

I thought something like this... Something is missing in regards to the way the shader reads resolutions and scales the scanlines.... Too bad neither of us know how to rewrite shaders, otherwise I think our problems would be solved...

BTW, what resolution/monitor are you playing Demul on? I'm using 1920x1080 on 67" DLP... Your screenshot looks pretty awesome! What game is that?

[Dogway]

I don't know programming but graphics and image manipulation is my forte.

I was aiming the MAME HLSL effect, I tried to take a screenshot of that but couldn't, but it really looks like a worn arcade cabinet monitor. High bloom, high gamma, yellowed image... What I observed today is that I went too yellow on blacks, it's more neutral on low tones, not so on mid tones, for that I used the "lift gamma" section. The good thing is that you can do color correction with SweetFX while in RetroArch you can't, so it's kind of saying well "but we have other things". I had though, to change the emus I was playing NeoGeo and CPS games from MAME to RA's FBA core due to reports of the former being laggy, for those games I want responsiveness.

I also wanted to blur the image a little but there's no such thing in the options, so maybe enabling SMAA antialias can be a good idea. Demul has built a great set of playable games, so not having a single one nice crt filter means that is a matter of time someone makes a decent port. The game is ATV Track form Gaelco. I think a year ago wasn't even emulable.

All my "debugging" is done on my monitor which is 1280x1024, I'm really not worrying about my TV set where I'm supposed to play until later. I share the same system for work and HTPC so one thing at a time. 1080p is much better (I have HDReady TV) because you can get higher resolutions and screen size for playing while still keeping on integer scale, which is important if you don't want moire or strange scanline patterns.

[Rick74]

I got that SweetFX-cgwg-CRT port we were looking for....I haven't tested it out yet... I attached it below. I'll check it out later

EDIT

After testing it out, I think it's just an early version of what eventually became the AdvanceCRT shader included with SweetFX. It doesn't scale correctly with the image i.e scanlines are too big and far apart, without a way to easily correct it

:>(

SweetFX-cgwg-CRT.zip

[Dogway]

Yes, as I told you the cgwg shader port is what became to be the AdvancedCRT. Images are misleading since they are photos instead of screenshots but probably that's all there is to it. Just wait, I think the above configuration is ok to get going until something better arises.

[Dime333]

Sorry Rick74, my wrong. It looks quite good, it doesn't wrap pixels as native scanlines do, but paired with the other sweetfx options is quite nice.

Here my try:

http://www.mediafire.com/view/d7fz3743cjn2jrx/SweetFX_settings.txt

What game is this?

[Rick74]

ATV Track from Galeco

[Dime333]

ATV Track from Galeco

OK. Cool. Is there any art available for that system?

[Rick74]

I don't know... I only recently discovered it myself... According to Demul, it seems that only 2 games are working (if you select Galeco from the siren l system list, there are only 2 games)

I'm sure someone knows better than me

[Rick74]

edited

[Rick74]

Yes, as I told you the cgwg shader port is what became to be the AdvancedCRT. Images are misleading since they are photos instead of screenshots but probably that's all there is to it. Just wait, I think the above configuration is ok to get going until something better arises.

By the way, your settings for SweetCRT look great. If you update your settings.txt, post it for me to check out please.