Retroarch shaders are fun!


klapse

Central Scrutinizer
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Aug 30, 2012
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I've been trying to chain shaders and overlays in retroarch to get a blend of crt-like feel combined with 'higher resolution' than SNES native. It has been super fun so far!

Here is xbr lv3 + luminosity + modified scanline overlay + bloom + dynamic noise
xbrv3lumscanbloomnoisyouwt.png

xbrv3lumscanbloomnoiscpx5b.png


It takes up roughly 77% of my intel i965 gpu at this resolution, so probably too much for a pi3.
 
Added a 'scanline' aperture-grille shader to dotmask.cg, now it doesn't need the scanline .png overlay. Tweaked colors, noise, and bloom shader.

dotmask_mode55sjr5.png

lufia2_scanline_apertoyjt7.png
 
I could never get these to work properly, how'd you go about getting them to work? (Although I like a clean picture without any artificial artifacts) :p
 
How ironic, isn't it ?
Anyway, thanks to Kimmy we will be able to start over from scratch.
 
I could never get these to work properly, how'd you go about getting them to work? (Although I like a clean picture without any artificial artifacts) :p

Configured retroarch git master with
./configure --enable-caca --enable-xmb --enable-sdl2 --enable-udev --enable-dbus --enable-ffmpeg --enable-threads --enable-dylib --enable-opengl --enable-x11 --enable-alsa --enable-tinyalsa --enable-freetype --enable-xvideo --enable-python --enable-v4l2 --enable-sse --enable-mmap --enable-videoprocessor --enable-cg

also grabbed retroarch-assets-master and built and installed them to ~/.config/retroarch

then downloaded the game system cores using retroarch's builtin downloader.

then started playing with the cg shaders, and eventually modifying them and making my own presets
 
Finally figured out how to do a bloom effect without blowing-out detail in bright regions. Trick is to do a log2(shift+color) on the summed bloom layer. Goal is to get a crt-like bloom (and give color gradients some blending) without being too distracting or obvious. Can you see the difference?

blapbloomsep08cjzfs.png
 
The crt style thingy is cool, but I just can't get used to these screenshots... the scanlines effect seems so wrong with interpolated images... I would have preferred original pixels or at least a little blur...
 
Bloom and scanlines are a stylistic choice, and perfectly valid if that's your thing. If not, go elsewhere.

I saw an article some years ago extolling the virtues of these CRT sims for making sprites that were made to be displayed on CRTs look good on sharper more modern displays. For the example they used, I found I could match most of their supposed improvements simply by tweaking the gamma. Anything more gave diminishing returns IME while also costing more CPU grunt, so on resource constrained environments with good displays (like the Pyra) I'll only be looking to tweak the gamma from inside emulators.
 
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