I am planning on eventually buying the things I need to connect my PC to my CRT via component but I was just curious, overall, how happy are you guys with your Mame HLSL shader settings?
How close do the HLSL shaders come to replicating an arcade monitor? Can you get good results with a lower end PC (Intel Quad Core 2.5Ghz, HD Radeon 7750)?
Similarly, how close to the retroarch shaders come to replicating a CRT for retro consoles?
How happy are you with your Mame HLSL shader settings?
Re: How happy are you with your Mame HLSL shader settings?
HLSL can be nice but it fails at clarity too often because of scaling issues, it requires too much smoothing to hide inconsistencies such as misaligned scanlines and pixels.
BUT I haven't tried the newest revision, which is supposed to correct a number of things.
Also custom integer-scaling controls are coming to MAME soon. And that will help a lot of the CRT shaders around.
CRT-Royale, only available to RetroArch, is the best at simulating CRTs. It's heavy and hard to use though, plus it can hurt the colors and brightness output a lot.
The problem is also that lcd monitors aren't good-enough, such simulation requires practically instant-response from the panel, and powerful luminosity.
(the latest OLED are good candidates)
I'm expecting the new BGFX rendered to bring great new possibilities, maybe something similar to Royale will happen, if not even better who knows ?
The 'new generation' MAME will be great and powerful.
Now in regards to cpu/gpu useage, I don't know if you have enough of it for Royale (maybe without bloom) but with 0.172 and its integer scaling; even using the .png overlay effects will be awesome, those weigh nothing and can still achieve clear, bright and more crt-ish look than most suspect, particularly for LCDs which have often smearing and low light output.
Check the pics here (zoom'em to full size or you'll miss the details): http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... qar4g2oav3
Well that will work on a decade-old laptop, even older, because no filters, no shaders, not even prescaling are required.
PS: by the way what's the relation to crt shaders and connecting your pc to a crt ? also your pc has component ?
BUT I haven't tried the newest revision, which is supposed to correct a number of things.
Also custom integer-scaling controls are coming to MAME soon. And that will help a lot of the CRT shaders around.
CRT-Royale, only available to RetroArch, is the best at simulating CRTs. It's heavy and hard to use though, plus it can hurt the colors and brightness output a lot.
The problem is also that lcd monitors aren't good-enough, such simulation requires practically instant-response from the panel, and powerful luminosity.
(the latest OLED are good candidates)
I'm expecting the new BGFX rendered to bring great new possibilities, maybe something similar to Royale will happen, if not even better who knows ?
The 'new generation' MAME will be great and powerful.
Now in regards to cpu/gpu useage, I don't know if you have enough of it for Royale (maybe without bloom) but with 0.172 and its integer scaling; even using the .png overlay effects will be awesome, those weigh nothing and can still achieve clear, bright and more crt-ish look than most suspect, particularly for LCDs which have often smearing and low light output.
Check the pics here (zoom'em to full size or you'll miss the details): http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... qar4g2oav3
Well that will work on a decade-old laptop, even older, because no filters, no shaders, not even prescaling are required.
PS: by the way what's the relation to crt shaders and connecting your pc to a crt ? also your pc has component ?
Strikers1945guy wrote:"Do we....eat chicken balls?!"
Re: How happy are you with your Mame HLSL shader settings?
It's not magic - but it's perfect vs. nothing.
It's going to be tough to emulate crt glow exactly especially since most lcds will not be bright enough and/or because they'll bloom differently and/or because it gets incredibly detailed once you get further down the rabbit hole:
Because the crt look is comprised of a rgb block with shadow mask/wires... you're probably looking at a kind of physical fidelity that minimum could be described as 12 parts more like double that 24 seperations ideally when you're talking pixels/images. But even @ 12 pixels x 320 (say game res) == 3840 pixels. Unless you've got a monitor with that kind of resolution wide you're obviously not going to be physically emulating the component parts of a crt. Even then you'd be getting some scaling/fuzziness unless you matched your filter tiling exactly to your screen res - and that's ignoring any other effects/limitations you want to simulate/impose (e.g. integer/bordered scaling etc.).
So for most people you're going to be talking about a bit of a compromise.
... But does that really matter? Probably not - as long as it looks more like a crt for most of the time you're playing it vs some garbage filtered mess and/or an overly sharp too perfect representation... But still... there's no accounting for personal preference and that's what ini files are for
It's going to be tough to emulate crt glow exactly especially since most lcds will not be bright enough and/or because they'll bloom differently and/or because it gets incredibly detailed once you get further down the rabbit hole:
Because the crt look is comprised of a rgb block with shadow mask/wires... you're probably looking at a kind of physical fidelity that minimum could be described as 12 parts more like double that 24 seperations ideally when you're talking pixels/images. But even @ 12 pixels x 320 (say game res) == 3840 pixels. Unless you've got a monitor with that kind of resolution wide you're obviously not going to be physically emulating the component parts of a crt. Even then you'd be getting some scaling/fuzziness unless you matched your filter tiling exactly to your screen res - and that's ignoring any other effects/limitations you want to simulate/impose (e.g. integer/bordered scaling etc.).
So for most people you're going to be talking about a bit of a compromise.
... But does that really matter? Probably not - as long as it looks more like a crt for most of the time you're playing it vs some garbage filtered mess and/or an overly sharp too perfect representation... But still... there's no accounting for personal preference and that's what ini files are for
Re: How happy are you with your Mame HLSL shader settings?
Well yeah, current solutions are using tricks, doing compromises, they're here for being used with still rather low-resolution displays (most flat panel monitors and tvs people own are still way below 4K anyway).
Without stepping into the rabbit hole indeed I think he's just looking for opinions on those.
The only thing that bugs me with crt shaders is the sometimes indeed very high cpu/gpu cost for something that doesn't look so much more advanced than the .png effects I've mentioned for that purpose.
To illustrate the below took me three minutes to make and cost probably only 1% additional gpu/cpu usage or something.
For using on my laptop, it already does 50% of the job CRT-Royale does when set to emulate an SD aperture grille.
When your LCD isn't very good nor high resolution-enough, or small~ish, IMHO those heavy, easily muddy, dark, and hard to configure shaders are not really relevant.
(but of course if power and resolution are not a problem there's no reason not to use them)
Without stepping into the rabbit hole indeed I think he's just looking for opinions on those.
The only thing that bugs me with crt shaders is the sometimes indeed very high cpu/gpu cost for something that doesn't look so much more advanced than the .png effects I've mentioned for that purpose.
To illustrate the below took me three minutes to make and cost probably only 1% additional gpu/cpu usage or something.
For using on my laptop, it already does 50% of the job CRT-Royale does when set to emulate an SD aperture grille.
When your LCD isn't very good nor high resolution-enough, or small~ish, IMHO those heavy, easily muddy, dark, and hard to configure shaders are not really relevant.
(but of course if power and resolution are not a problem there's no reason not to use them)
Strikers1945guy wrote:"Do we....eat chicken balls?!"