When you don't care about the horizontal pixel count it's really not complicated to imitate at least part of what those crt shaders do, with a single PNG overlay.
Also compared to the other png's I've made it's more flexible since the method works with more integer factors.
What's really delicate though is to find the right rgb and black tones, because the stronger you make them the easier it is to give a 'shape', but the darker the whole picture will be of course.
But again if this looks really great on a big and bright display, most of the little details visible on still screens disappear with the typical LCD smearing/blur when things start moving. And again it's not vertical and diagonal movement friendly.
Here it's 4x5 (
the default overscanned integer for Capcom games on a 1080 display) using a
3x5 png, only RGB and black strips, mixed using alpha transparencies.
Filtering and prescale off as usual.
darker;
I'll post the details when I find a better balance.
Looking into this made me realize why people add so much smoothing, bleeding and shit to their shaders (chains or not) when doing without is actually much better for clarity and closer to how a real rgb crt in good shape looks like.
The screens you see up there like most of the examples I've posted before, definitely look better in a real environment, in this case this is intended for using with a mid-sized TV (42") from a chair approximately 4~5 feet away (1,5m) looking big/overscanned for convenience.
From that distance or even further the crt effect shape looks much more natural than what you're seeing there up close.
But people most of the time - I'm guessing - are using crt shaders on their PC monitors sitting 20"/50cm away, which naturally doesn't help it looking nice if a kind of artificial smoothing/defocus is not added to make it look less 'rough'. They're forgetting maybe that most crts often look fucking rough too when you stick your nose on them, and that neither home sets nor arcade monitors used fancy high tvl broadcast tubes.
Also I think many saw a good number of shared close-up pictures of crt tubes, often looking softer and less contrasted than live working tubes do.
All-in-all I think there's something else to explore, and maybe get over the currently slightly wrong conception of what crt simulation on LCDs should be, minding how crts behave IRL/live and the limitations most LCDs unfortunately still show.
Personally I'm still just experimenting things with png overlays despite the limitations of it, again it's not an end solution though people using very cpu/gpu power-limited setups might like it, but I'm still struck very often by how satisfying such a lightweight and simple method can be, even defeating heavyweight 'elite' shaders in practice during gameplay if not in screenshots contests. :p
I'm almost picturing shaders or whatever made/configured for specific types and sizes of LCDs, minding their specs (Hz, backlighting, response, max brightness, coating, etc) and even sitting distance and room environment in mind.