Software-based scanliner/upscaler?

[brirec]

I recently got a dream display for CRT emulation, which unfortunately is ahead of the CRT emu tech itself: the 5K iMac, mounted to a 360º rotatable arm (for shmups). I ordered a capture card with a known low latency, but I still imagine I'll be dealing with generic linear or nearest-neighbor upscaling on any games I play on it. Is there any way (perhaps using the .cg/.cgp, etc. files from libretro) to pipe the output of a generic capture device through something like this? I don't expect to play games where I'm going to be going nuts over latency, so as long as it isn't that much worse than what you'd find from 480p on a cheap LCD I'm sure I'll be fine.


By the way, I fear this may be the wrong forum here to post this — it clearly says "hardware" when I'm looking for software. I apologize, I just couldn't find anything more suitable since I am looking for an upscaler, albeit a software one.

Thanks!

[telemetry]

This almost sounds like a job for one of those Holo3DGraph capture cards (which Fudoh's other Yokotate blog/site examines), since it has a built in real-time low-delay deinterlacer, BUT the question is how you would interface it with the 5K iMac.

Perhaps there's some sort of Thunderbolt > PCI external cradle (the best you could do is probably one of Sonnet's PCIe external cradles), along with a PCIe to PCI (conventional) adapter, kind of like this one from StarTech.

This is more of a hardware answer and it sounds like you've got a capture solution in mind already. But your situation sounded really interesting and the aforementioned came to mind. I'd be very curious to hear what your final result is and if you get a solution working with libretro.

[SGGG2]

If you have a Blackmagic Intensity Capture device and Windows installed, you could always use Ptbi for monitoring/scaling and Reshade for scanlines/visual effects.