Achieving period-correct graphics in personal computer emulators

[Rincewind]

The phosphor overlay is that mask thing right?

Yes.

I played with it with the ffmpeg version but never liked it, is it like a big requirement for the CRT look?

Yes again. But note what is *authenthic* might not necessarily be what you *like*.

Look, if you just want to do something that you like, this is cool. Does it look like a CRT? Well, kinda sorta... vaguely... but not really. What you've done is an exaggerated caricature of *some* aspects of CRTs.

If your only point of reference is how you *think* a CRT should look like, you're in a difficult spot to come up with something authentic. Only using a real CRT for prolonged periods of time is what really helps achieve that goal. It's very hard to create photos of CRTs that reflect the *actual* experience... and then you view those photos on modern flat screens that in many regards are *inferior* to CRTs. It's an impossible mission; you're recreating an impression of an imperfect copy on a medium that's not even capable of fully reproducing the original even in the best circumstances.

But if you just wanna have some fun and achieve something a bit more authentic, have a look at the examples in this mega-thread:
https://forums.libretro.com/t/new-crt-shader-from-guest-crt-guest-advanced-updates/

Most of these are generally very good, and the shader itself is state-of-the-art (I'm using a variant of this in WinUAE).

Good luck

 

[solemgar]

I barely remember how a real CRT looks like but somehow I keep trying to chase the feeling via shaders.


Damn you nostalgia

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Saw dgVoodoo and its scaling features mentioned in this topic. I've been using dgVoodoo to get old DirectX8 (and earlier games) working smoothly under Windows 10+ and newer video cards, and for that it works superbly. However, I recently used it for its scaling features for the first time because I wanted larger, more readable fonts and UI in 4K for some of these old games. The good news is that it does an excellent job at that too. The bad news is that any movies or cut scenes the games have will be severely enlarged and cropped because you changed dgvoodoo's unforced resolution to 3840x2160 or whatever. Apparently there's no fix for this. If you want to play something like old Sea Dogs games in 4k with enlarged, readable UI using dgVoodoo's scaling feature and want to see the cutscenes and movies, you're shit out of luck.

I imagine something like Klingon Academy at 2160p (or higher) with dgvoodooo enlarged UI wouldn't be feasible because there's several hours of FMV and cutscenes, though I haven't tested this particular game. I saw one guy running KA at 8K but he wasn't able to scale the UI because he wasn't using dgvoodoo so all the messages, icons and general UI elements were the size of FDA warnings on the backs of miniature bottles of aspirin. In other words, USELESS. If any of you tech graphics gurus have alternatives to using dgvoodoo to scale old games to 4K with readable UIs and not effect movies/cutscenes please let me know

 

[Nutmeg]

The alternative of course is to use RA's WindowCast core and scale (in a way) though CRT emulation. It may add a frame of lag (or more, sporadically), which is annoying for action games, but for single player PC action games or other genres it's not a big deal at all. I am playing Akai Katana, which is a very input latency sensitive game, through the WindowCast core (downscaling 720p to 360p *chef's kiss* for that extra anti aliasing and an SD era look) and I can tolerate it.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

The alternative of course is to use RA's WindowCast core and scale (in a way) though CRT emulation. It may add a frame of lag (or more, sporadically), which is annoying for action games, but for single player PC action games or other genres it's not a big deal at all. I am playing Akai Katana, which is a very input latency sensitive game, through the WindowCast core (downscaling 720p to 360p *chef's kiss* for that extra anti aliasing and an SD era look) and I can tolerate it.

I'm not familiar with WindowCast (have used RA with success, however) but it sounds like you use it to downscale. I bought a 4K OLED LG C2 display last year and try to play everything I can in 4K (I've had surprising success too, with the vast majority of the games I want to play - both old and recent - able to handle 2160p at 60-120 FPS on an Nvidia RTX 3070) so I want to upscale these old games to get glorious 4K but UI elements are typically just too small at these high resolutions on old games.

 

[Nutmeg]

Yeah I understand, hence the "in a way" I put in parentheses. The way meant here is of course that the final rendered image is indeed scaled to fill your whole screen at its native resolution, it's just the source image to do so (the natively rendered game image) which may be downscaled.

https://forums.libretro.com/t/official-release-thread-for-windowcast-core/40464

 

[jakkis]

Any chance of more blog posts? I really enjoyed your writings.

 

[Rincewind]

Any chance of more blog posts? I really enjoyed your writings.

Cheers man. They're coming. I'm just busy with multiple projects, plus I also like to do other stuff than coding/writing from time to time, so everything goes slowly.

But it's not forgotten, neither abandoned, far from it. It's just a multi-year effort.

 

[deama]

Ok so I made it work with videos and .gifs too now:
Sadly wasn't able to figure out an easy way to keep them RGBA, so it'll remove the transparency.

original:

new:

Here's the link if anyone is interested:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x7WcRZQFDuoDg_0q0XhGpvjWvgdeOLCo/view?usp=sharing

You can tweak the values in the scanlines.py at the end.

There's a req.txt for the packages to be installed, and you'll also need ffmpeg installed for video stuff.

So far it only works on 1 thread, so if the video stuff is still too slow, you could probably speed it up a lot by doing multithreading.

So I've made adjustments, I've added in a slight saturation because I found it to slightly dull the output image, it should be better now.

At any rate, I managed to make it several times faster, it's pretty viable to do it for videos now.
It's multi-processing now too, by default it's configured to use half of your max CPU core count, which for me on my 7950x3dv is faster than the video itself, if the original video was 480p.
It outputs the video as an av1 codec at 10000 bitrate, you can adjust this if it's too high or too low in the code.
I've also improved various parts of the code to make it much more performant in general. So in the end it's like 16x or so faster if you got a decent CPU.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1emKmaz6lt7rsAr4VwX8wHc2ZFaLJYLOs/view?usp=sharing

I've been using it to convert the old storyteller episodes into more CRT based, I think it looks good.
I can now do full movies, they shouldn't take very long, haven't tested on videos at 1080p though.

 

[deama]

I'm not sure if anyone knows of anything, but I'm looking for a CRT filter thingy (at least scanlines) for fallout 2 with sfall?
I know that in e.g. exodos they have fallout 1 there with Rincewind 's changes, but fallout 2 isn't on there.
Anyone know if something like this was done as an extension for sfall or some such?