Screenshot thread

[Kabas]

Darth Roxor and GamerCat_ posts in that boomer shooter thread inspired me to try out Halo.

I might have downloaded a wrong game tho.

Spoiler

WAD is Havoc in Creation. Mod is Halo: Doom Evolved.
I really do want to try out Halo: Combat Evolved later.

Kabas, have you played Eviternity 2?
I only played the first Eviternity and it was really awesome.

No, currently not interested in starting any of these huge 30 maps long megawads. Might try Eviternity later but not now.
Vastly prefer shorter 8 or 15 maps long WADs as they don't tend to feel like a drag after reaching a halfway point.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Spoiler

 

[Rincewind]

Just attempting to restore cosmic balance in this sea of lowly FPS games...

Geneforge 1 - Mutagen

 

[Jason Liang]

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[ds]

Ok big guy, keep punching that air.

Deep.

Do. These. Have. To. Be. So. Fucking. Slow.

Such choice.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

Going through Bear's Gay 1 for the first time in a long time using the windowcast retroarch core. Playing as a Cleric/Thief also for the first time. Reminds me a lot of my Warhammer: Online runepriest, if he could backstab with a big quarterstaff.

 

[Rincewind]

The Volatile Thahd appears to be living a happier and more fulfilling life than most Codexers

 

[taxalot]

People actually play with a curved CRT filter, imagine that.

 

[Darth Roxor]

war

is hell

and I

AM THE DEVIL

stay down, ugly alien sons of bitches

STOP! YOU'VE VIOLATED THE LAW!

 

[Rincewind]

People actually play with a curved CRT filter, imagine that.

Those shader are absolutely ghastly. Just terrible, just nope.

 

[taxalot]

People actually play with a curved CRT filter, imagine that.

Those shader are absolutely ghastly. Just terrible, just nope.

I've tried a few of these. They feel "great" a couple of seconds in and are an assault on the eye minutes later.

I draw the line at interlacing .

Putting this sentence in bold because I saw the pun as I wrote it.

 

[Rincewind]

People actually play with a curved CRT filter, imagine that.

Those shader are absolutely ghastly. Just terrible, just nope.

I've tried a few of these. They feel "great" a couple of seconds in and are an assault on the eye minutes later.

I draw the line at interpolation.

Putting this sentence in bold because I saw the pun as I wrote it.

For DOS, try our CRT shaders. These are quite authentic to the real thing. Example images on the front page:

https://dosbox-staging.github.io/

 

[schru]

Going through Bear's Gay 1 for the first time in a long time using the windowcast retroarch core. Playing as a Cleric/Thief also for the first time. Reminds me a lot of my Warhammer: Online runepriest, if he could backstab with a big quarterstaff.

Screen curvature aside, it seems like there's too much blurring in the displayed image. Some C.R.T. shaders incorporate bilinear filtering, but this seems more like it might be due to filtering applied by the wrapper on upscaling the resolution, perhaps? I think those shaders are intended to be used with unfiltered upscaled image, so nearest neighbour scaling, and preferably integer scaling to avoid uneven distribution of the pattern or additional blurring.

CNC-DDraw seems to handle Infinity Engine games very well. It comes with all the elementary scaling options and compatibility fixes, and it has some of the popular C.R.T. shaders bundled. Some of them apply bilinear filtering, while others don't, but it feels to me—without having a real C.R.T. monitor with which to compare them—that a very modest amount of blurring is welcome if the real monitor's size is much larger than that of a 15–17" C.R.T. monitor.

It may be possible to use CNC-DDraw as a basis for other shader injectors too, as it doesn't seem it's compatible with just any other GLSL shaders if they're placed in its shaders folder.

I've taken some screenshots using a variant of Lottes's shader and just two at the end with yee64. Inserting just two because of their size, the rest is available from the links below:

modified Lottes

yee64

https://ibb.co/YhyNLLY

https://ibb.co/r3t8vzn

https://ibb.co/9TyQBVY

https://ibb.co/kJMwr2H

https://ibb.co/94C0s1W

https://ibb.co/F7bRf39

https://ibb.co/fGp8V0G

https://ibb.co/Wgb4Wy9

https://ibb.co/pPRnJFK

https://ibb.co/r06yqGv

https://ibb.co/MgjF6FC

https://ibb.co/5G2Vy2T

https://ibb.co/qM0bmhF


https://ibb.co/tDbPQVD

 

[Zlaja]

Krauts in the Zone!

 

[Rincewind]

without having a real C.R.T. monitor with which to compare them

That's a losing battle. Lottes is better, but still not that close. Looks more like a higher quality small TV, not a PC monitor, and the phospor mask is way too strong.

Lottes is *meant* to emulate TV sets and perhaps much lower quality arcade monitors — check out the source, the top comment says so.

I tweaked the CRT shaders in DOSBox Staging while looking at the output of my SVGA CRT monitors.

Check out the front row here (640x480):
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/#screenshots-vga

And the HoMM2 shot at the top of the page (640x480).

These are pretty authentic, it doesn't get much better than that using current technology for SVGA CRT emulation (note these shots are at 4K; you can't convincingly emulated 640x480 SVGA and upwards on 1080p).

 

[d1r]

schru Nearest Neighbour filtering for Infinity Engine games is still the best "shader". Those CRT shaders are complete meme-material.

Only downside of course is that you need a RTX card.

 

[schru]

without having a real C.R.T. monitor with which to compare them

That's a losing battle. Lottes is better, but still not that close. Looks more like a higher quality small TV, not a PC monitor, and the phospor mask is way too strong.

Lottes is *meant* to emulate TV sets and perhaps much lower quality arcade monitors — check out the source, the top comment says so.

I tweaked the CRT shaders in DOSBox Staging while looking at the output of my SVGA CRT monitors.

Check out the front row here (640x480):
https://dosbox-staging.github.io/#screenshots-vga

And the HoMM2 shot at the top of the page (640x480).

These are pretty authentic, it doesn't get much better than that using current technology for SVGA CRT emulation (note these shots are at 4K; you can't convincingly emulated 640x480 SVGA and upwards on 1080p).

Yes, I realize that Lottes was made to emulate other types of screens, but it tends to be fairly balanced looking out of all the options that are usually provided in C.R.T. shader sets. The second screenshot is of the easymode shader, which I think is supposed to be more faithful to PC monitors?

At any rate, in this case I only wanted to point out what CNC-DDraw can do, as I suspect it might be easier to use than the method involving Retroarch, so I just picked some shaders from the folder. I would very much like to try it with your shader, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

Since the last time we spoke (I apologize about not getting back to you so far), I have finally started using a 4K monitor and DOSBox Staging with your automatic shader, so I'm only now able to start evaluating the various options properly. The effect in Heroes of Might & Magic is indeed very pleasing, but I have some doubts about games running at 320x200 and rendered at 640x400 in place of the double scan technique. It's a subject for a different thread, but just to mention it briefly, doesn't doubling the number of horizontal pixels in addition to the the number of the vertical cause C.R.T. shaders to produce a picture with more horizontal definition than there should be, since it has more pixels to work with this way? The result looks a bit ‘chunky’, with the nearest neighbour interpolation sort of showing through the pattern more than perhaps it should?

Of course, I don't have a technical understanding of the process, so I'm just curious if this is a relevant factor.

schru Nearest Neighbour filtering for Infinity Engine games is still the best "shader". Those CRT shaders are complete meme-material.

Only downside of course is that you need a RTX card.

As I said, I used the above shaders only as a demonstration. But does nearest neighbour scaling performed by the card achieve a different effect compared to just using this scaling mode within a wrapper? I do have an RTX card now. Do you mean the integer scaling in the scaling section in Adjust Desktop Size and Position or Image Scaling in Manage 3D Settings? I'm not sure if Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) could also be used for 2-D DirectDraw games.

 

[d1r]

schru
Yes, it's the Integer scaling option. And also yes, it does a better job than all the other wrappers I have tried to use via Reshade before I got a RTX card.

 

[Stella Brando]

 

[e-mailio estevez]

Going through Bear's Gay 1 for the first time in a long time using the windowcast retroarch core. Playing as a Cleric/Thief also for the first time. Reminds me a lot of my Warhammer: Online runepriest, if he could backstab with a big quarterstaff.

Screen curvature aside, it seems like there's too much blurring in the displayed image. Some C.R.T. shaders incorporate bilinear filtering, but this seems more like it might be due to filtering applied by the wrapper on upscaling the resolution, perhaps? I think those shaders are intended to be used with unfiltered upscaled image, so nearest neighbour scaling, and preferably integer scaling to avoid uneven distribution of the pattern or additional blurring.

CNC-DDraw seems to handle Infinity Engine games very well. It comes with all the elementary scaling options and compatibility fixes, and it has some of the popular C.R.T. shaders bundled. Some of them apply bilinear filtering, while others don't, but it feels to me—without having a real C.R.T. monitor with which to compare them—that a very modest amount of blurring is welcome if the real monitor's size is much larger than that of a 15–17" C.R.T. monitor.

It may be possible to use CNC-DDraw as a basis for other shader injectors too, as it doesn't seem it's compatible with just any other GLSL shaders if they're placed in its shaders folder.

I've taken some screenshots using a variant of Lottes's shader and just two at the end with yee64. Inserting just two because of their size, the rest is available from the links below:

modified Lottes

yee64

I'll give it a looking into. Really it's my first time messing around with the Windowcast core. I'm predisposed to the bezel-type shaders in retroarch, and have in more recent days been using Zomb's Bezel Megapack. But it just looks completely wrong in BG1, the text is very tiny.

I didn't think my current setup looked *that* bad, but then again I am a retard. It's been a fun exercise to tinker around with regardless.

 

[schru]

Going through Bear's Gay 1 for the first time in a long time using the windowcast retroarch core. Playing as a Cleric/Thief also for the first time. Reminds me a lot of my Warhammer: Online runepriest, if he could backstab with a big quarterstaff.

Screen curvature aside, it seems like there's too much blurring in the displayed image. Some C.R.T. shaders incorporate bilinear filtering, but this seems more like it might be due to filtering applied by the wrapper on upscaling the resolution, perhaps? I think those shaders are intended to be used with unfiltered upscaled image, so nearest neighbour scaling, and preferably integer scaling to avoid uneven distribution of the pattern or additional blurring.

CNC-DDraw seems to handle Infinity Engine games very well. It comes with all the elementary scaling options and compatibility fixes, and it has some of the popular C.R.T. shaders bundled. Some of them apply bilinear filtering, while others don't, but it feels to me—without having a real C.R.T. monitor with which to compare them—that a very modest amount of blurring is welcome if the real monitor's size is much larger than that of a 15–17" C.R.T. monitor.

It may be possible to use CNC-DDraw as a basis for other shader injectors too, as it doesn't seem it's compatible with just any other GLSL shaders if they're placed in its shaders folder.

I've taken some screenshots using a variant of Lottes's shader and just two at the end with yee64. Inserting just two because of their size, the rest is available from the links below:

modified Lottes

yee64

I'll give it a looking into. Really it's my first time messing around with the Windowcast core. I'm predisposed to the bezel-type shaders in retroarch, and have in more recent days been using Zomb's Bezel Megapack. But it just looks completely wrong in BG1, the text is very tiny.

I didn't think my current setup looked *that* bad, but then again I am a retard. It's been a fun exercise to tinker around with regardless.

I suppose CNC-DDraw doesn't offer anything different, if you know what you're doing with Retroarch. It's just a question of choosing the right shader and tweaking it, if necessary. It seems like console emulation has been receiving much more attention in that area so far, so we just need something like preconfigured shaders that work well with specific resolutions. As regards the screenshots you've uploaded, I would just try setting the scaling resampling to nearest neighbour, or turn off bilinear filtering, if possible. As for curvature, it's a matter of preference, as I don't think it contributed anything to the presentation and the ultimate aim was to reduce it as much as possible.

 

[Rincewind]

doesn't doubling the number of horizontal pixels in addition to the the number of the vertical cause C.R.T. shaders to produce a picture with more horizontal definition than there should be, since it has more pixels to work with this way? The result looks a bit ‘chunky’, with the nearest neighbour interpolation sort of showing through the pattern more than perhaps it should?

The VGA double scanning of 320x200 content does look chunky. That's how all VGA cards in existence work.

The VGA hardware effectively does a 2x upscaling. Think of it this way: there is no true 320x200 mode on VGA. Zero. Nada. All VGA hardware in existence, *all*, emulate 320x200 by 2x upscaling it to 640x400.

Technically, the three "native" resolutions of VGA boards are 640x400, 640x350, and 640x480. Plus their 720 pixel wide variants for the standard text modes. Then there are higher resolutions on SVGA/VESA, yeah, but as a rule of thumb, all standard resolutions below 640x350 are width and height doubled *in hardware*. You cannot disable it, you cannot turn it off, it is done, period. That's how VGA was designed, end of story.

Yeah, that makes 320x200 chunky as fuck, and pixels look like sharp rectangles. I used to have an Amiga until 1995, and Commodore monitors can display "true 320x200" resolution which doesn't look chunky. Then when I bought my first PC, I was dissapointed how chunky lowres gfx looked on my PC SVGA monitor. My disappointment lasted until 640x480 Windows games became the norm...

So we're emulating what's authentic. And low-res VGA *is* chunky and looks blocky as fuck. Check out photos online, "CRT monitor VGA photo" into Google, etc.

I explain all this in my DOSBox Staging getting started guide. Read the whole thing, carefully. You'll learn a ton of things not just about Staging, but also about PC and DOS gaming history. If you're impatient, start with this... then read the whole thing.

https://dosbox-staging.github.io/getting-started/passport-to-adventure/#true-ega-emulation

 

[Rincewind]

Also, you guys confuse these three things and use them interchangeably, which I found super confusing:

- nearest-neighbour interpolation (can result in uneven scaling)
- integer scaling (a special case of nearest neighbour)
- bilinear sharp interpolation (which is not plain bilinear, far from it)

 

[normie]

Krauts in the Zone!

that'd be Herman Shutnik