Greatest screen filter ever

[austere]

http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/8320 ... erever.png

This screenshot does it no justice, this filter will blow a lot of people away once its released.

Coming soon to a MAME near you thanks to MooglyGuy. Requires a GPU capable of running Pixel Shader 2 shaders* (3 was required previously but he cut it down apparently), won't load your CPU much at all.

EDIT: Let's say P.S. 3 for now.

[Sumez]

Only 1.5 mil at the second boss? Someone needs to learn the score system or stop credit feeding

[ptoing]

austere, do you know how customisable it will be? The glare of the brighter colours is a bit much for my taste in that shot as well as the curvature (which i do not really care much about). But it does look rather cool I have to say.

[austere]

Only 1.5 mil at the second boss? Someone needs to learn the score system or stop credit feeding

I was/am really sleep deprived and that was the only credit (check the last digit).

austere, do you know how customisable it will be?

It's extremely customisable, it's a bit difficult to understand what each setting does unless you know how the technique works but I'm sure MooglyGuy will document it thoroughly (he already has conversationally). This isn't your typical fakescanline/geometry/crappy NTSC filter, it is a 8-pass filter written from a great understanding of how CRTs work. Takes into account both temporal and spatial effects.

But it does look rather cool I have to say.

Yeah honestly, you have to see it to believe it. I ran it last night and was utterly shocked. There is nothing that even compares to this filter out there, nothing. Of course there will be ways to improve it but damn, it's good and it runs in real time.

[Necronom]

Thanks austere. Looks very promising. Looking forward to it...and the document on how it works

[BPzeBanshee]

I reckon this will be performance-intensive like any of the other filters but it certainly looks interesting.

Will this be able to be ported outside of MAME? I may suggest this to Eke-Eke for Genesis Plus GX at some point.

[austere]

I reckon this will be performance-intensive like any of the other filters but it certainly looks interesting.

Only on your GPU, as long as that component is good enough, you will not experience much additional load on your system! All the CPU does is share the render buffer with the GPU and call each stage of the pixel shader (which would run on the GPU, not the CPU, which runs the emulator).

By the way, two more screenshots:

http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/4844/ket.png (Note: 3Mb)
http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/6295/mslug.png (Note: 4Mb)

These use nimitz's rather than LordNightmare's settings. As with the one before, this is something you have to see in action to appreciate.

[Skykid]

Very impressive! That MS snap looks like a crt.

[worstplayer]

Takes into account both temporal and spatial effects.

Does that mean it'll smooth out "every other frame" shadows in Cave games? They look horrible on LCDs.

[MathU]

I really don't understand some people's obsession with scanlines.

And this really isn't specific to 2D shooters. People need to stop posting random MAME threads in Shmups Chat unless they actually have something to deal specifically with them.

[Udderdude]

It's obviously more than just a cheap scanline/blur filter. This is as close to a CRT as you're going to get (at the moment, anyway).

It looks amazing, two thumbs up.

I suppose I should add, Recap should be eating his heart out right about now. This makes his 'CRT' effects on the screenshots at his site look like the badly photoshopped garbage they really are.

[emphatic]

Awesome! Will it be available to game devs as well? Sort of like a wrapper would be cool, so your can run XOP, Xeno Fighers-R etc through it.

[KNTain]

So, is this part of some wholly new effect system?

Looks gorgeous. I'm excited.

I suppose I should add, Recap should be eating his heart out right about now. This makes his 'CRT' effects on the screenshots at his site look like the badly photoshopped garbage they really are.

This filter reminds me of his screenshots (higher-res ones) more than anything, though. They look awfully similar to the ones in the Postback thread talking about the whole photoshopping process. I'd imagine he'd be nothing but happy about this.

[austere]

Will it be available to game devs as well?

That will probably will depend on the license, i.e. upto Moogly. He's kind enough to have explained the technique though, so in principle, people can reproduce it if they have the skills. I had a similar idea a while ago but I never got around to it. He went many steps further though, this is a comprehensive solution and I don't see anyone topping it for a while to come.

So, is this part of some wholly new effect system?

Sort of! There really should be a system but at the moment it's controlled directly by the mame command line options/configuration file.

They look awfully similar to the ones in the Postback thread talking about the whole photoshopping process. I'd imagine he'd be nothing but happy about this.

I signed up to the postback forums to ask him and Eboshidori some questions because that thread was jam packed with information. Account wasn't activated, no doubt due to a bit of drama at the time. Their input would definitely be very interesting though.

[jepjepjep]

As a self-professed visual snob, this filter does look phenomenal! The curvature seems a bit extreme though...

Will this filter work with the SDL variants of mame?

[Udderdude]

As a self-professed visual snob, this filter does look phenomenal! The curvature seems a bit extreme though...

If it's customizeable, I'm sure you can set the curvature.

[austere]

Will this filter work with the SDL variants of mame?

Yeah, when someone rewrites it in GLSL (it's in HLSL atm).

[Udderdude]

I suppose I should add, Recap should be eating his heart out right about now. This makes his 'CRT' effects on the screenshots at his site look like the badly photoshopped garbage they really are.

This filter reminds me of his screenshots (higher-res ones) more than anything, though. They look awfully similar to the ones in the Postback thread talking about the whole photoshopping process. I'd imagine he'd be nothing but happy about this.

I was talking more about stuff like this:

Which has so many problems and is so far from an actual CRT that it's kind of pointless to even add the effects if they look that bad.

And then there's shit like this:

That's right, scanlines and curveature on a GBA game. Which had an LCD display. wut >_>

(Ok, so GBA screen did have slight vertical scanlines but not anything strikingly noticeable)

[cools]

The Metal Slug one isn't bad, but I see no shadowmask simulation on any of them.

[austere]

I think the latest version will grab shadow masks from the artwork and overlay them during one of the step, haven't tried it though.

To be honest, current LCD resolution is inadequate for shadow mask emulation so I'd say it's probably better without it but I wouldn't mind a surprise.

[cools]

I agree partly - but people seem to overhype scanlines, curvature and blur as the most important part of a CRT, when in reality a good low resolution display will have a more textured and crisp appearance than a harshly scanlined and colour blurred one. Curvature is also not that noticeable if you're sitting at a decent angle.

Still, someone's looking into it, which is good

[austere]

Trust me, this is much more than what you see in the screenshots -- it goes as far as emulating jitter between the scans! A slight curvature is important to give a nice mild moire effects, making the visual acuity even higher alongside the scanlines.

[Sumez]

Very impressive! That MS snap looks like a crt.

Except the actual game is a lot less blurry on a real CRT! Hopefully that can be toned down...

[austere]

Over the past few days I've been working on a set of shaders that allow a user to simulate many aspects of a signal being displayed on a CRT monitor. Yesterday and last night I began porting this work into MAME and MESS. There are still several things yet that need to be re-added from my standalone version (chroma subsampling, phosphorescence, and a phosphor mask), but I'm at a point where I'd like to start getting input.

If you are capable of building your own copy of MAME or MESS and have a video card capable of supporting at least Pixel Shader 3.0, please download the ZIP below, play with the settings, and let me know what you think. I'll be replying shortly with a few interesting presets.

Be sure to read the readme, and if you get an error to the effect of "Unable to load d3dx9.dll", download and install the latest DirectX redistributable package off of Microsoft's website, locate d3dx9_43.dll, put it in your c:\windows\system32 and c:\windows\syswow64 folders (the latter folder in the case of 64-bit users only), then modify d3d9intf.c line 141 to read "d3dx9_43.dll" instead of "d3dx9d_43.dll".

For those who can recompile MAME:

http://icips.us/emulation/crt/hlslmame_test2.zip

(Like he said, make sure you read the readme file.)

Source and Relevant link with heaps of screenshots.

[yosai]

For those who can recompile MAME:

http://icips.us/emulation/crt/hlslmame_test2.zip

(Like he said, make sure you read the readme file.)

Source and Relevant link with heaps of screenshots.

Thanks for the link and info. I'll have a go with this tomorrow.

[Ghetto Tate]

Jeeze,never knew there were scanline fetishists..

[Barrakketh]

Jeeze,never knew there were scanline fetishists..

You haven't been in the hardware section of this board, have you?

[TrevHead (TVR)]

Intresting, the few filters ive tried in the past all looked shit but this looks quite good.

[captpain]

I've just drawn a bunch of horizontal lines across my monitor with a Sharpie. Seems to have worked pretty well.

[Frederik]

Aside from playing SNES and PS2 games on my old shitty TV (hooked up via RCA to make it even messier) I don´t really have any sentimental feelings for the CRT look. I actually prefer the straight-up pixel look without any filters at all (it was a great day for me when I figured out how to disable filters in MAME).

But I have to say that I´m still intrigued by this, mainly because it looks so realistic. I´ve read a very interesting article in the german "Retro" magazine that talked about how for example the barrier in Yars Revenge on the Amiga looks very ugly without the CRT blur and glow - an effect that the game designer had taken advantage of.

Filters like these defintely are interesting from the "fuzzy" side of emulation - how games actually looked, and not just the plain program side itself. Some games seem to have made deliberate use of the CRT nature in their graphics, and since these monitors are going to die out completely sooner or later, emulating this old look with more depth than just the typical "let´s slap some black lines on this" makes sense from a simulation perspective.

One thing I´ve never even thought about before is that in that the CRT makes the low resolution of these games look very different than on modern LCD/LED screens. In that Metal Slug screen it seems to me that this filter makes the graphics look more detailed than they actually are - probably because our brains tend to fill in the gaps.