Screen filters look really bad?

[marco.nadal.75]

I'm using AMD Radeon HD6950 at 1920x1080 and both smooth and crisp filters look really bad, expecially compared to HQ3X on MAME, WinUAE and Zandronum. In the Store video it looks really good.

What resolution do you play as?

Hey WBacon, any chance of a Patch 1.0.3 adding support for HQ filter? Or SuperEagle?

[NeonDrare]

1280x720 4:3(normal) i think is the best resolution to play

[Robinson Drake]

Why stop at HQx when you can go xBRZ?

https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/xbrz/screenshots/xBRZ%2022.png/1
https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/xbrz/screenshots/ga.png/1

[Spectrum Legacy]

xBRZ is definitely better than HQ from my experience, but still this kind of filters are imo abominations which distort and ruin the original visuals of classic games.

[Chad "The King" ThunderCuck]

i find that #1 benefits greatly from XBR, while #2 is perfectly fine with no special filters. use ReShade to essentially add your own filtering. i like using the options in the guasian blur effect for 2d games. once again, its going to be alot less effective on #2 due to higher numbers of colors and sprite resolution. very carefully tuned bloom can also make a massive difference in your special attacks and displayed lights, but its very difficult to make it not effect random spots across each map due to light areas. have fun with it. use ReShade on pretty much every game you play.

[marco.nadal.75]

Thanks for that KINGS, I had no idea such a utility existed. ReShade https://reshade.me works like the XBox 360 Controller Emulator www.x360ce.com in that the utility is installed in the directory of each game that you want to use it with, and you close it after setting it up. It runs every time you start the game without further input by the user. Allowed me to play Dark Souls on a PowerWave controller.

I set resolution to 1920 x 1080 with Curves & HQ4X post-processing, in-built filter set to NONE. Works well

Oh and Spectrum, if you haven't already, try ReShade's CRT filter for that authentic look ... unless you have an *actual* CRT.

[Chad "The King" ThunderCuck]

Originally posted by marco.nadal.75:

Thanks for that KINGS, I had no idea such a utility existed. ReShade (https://reshade.me) works like the XBox 360 Controller Emulator (www.x360ce.com) in that the utility is installed in the directory of each game that you want to use it with, and you close it after setting it up. It runs every time you start the game without further input by the user. Allowed me to play Dark Souls on a PowerWave controller.

I set resolution to 1920 x 1080 with Curves & HQ4X post-processing, in-built filter set to NONE. Works well

Oh and Spectrum, if you haven't already, try ReShade's CRT filter for that authentic look ... unless you have an *actual* CRT.

nah you instal reshade into its own folder and use the Mediator program in there to install and tweak all your shaders for each game. doing a manual instal for each game is just tedious. as for the CRT shader, use guassian blur. the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ scanlines and washed out look the crt shaders give, even though you never actually see scanlines on a crt, make every game look terrible. guassian blur with a little chromatic abberation does the job perfectly without adding a bunch of stupid looking black lines all over the screen.

[Spectrum Legacy]

Originally posted by marco.nadal.75:

Oh and Spectrum, if you haven't already, try ReShade's CRT filter for that authentic look ... unless you have an *actual* CRT.

Yea cheers, I reckon crt filters are better than nothing when playing on LCD, but as you suggested, I do use an actual and very decent crt pc monitor for most of 8bit,16bit and low-res games in general to this very day. Nothing comes close as it offers best of both worlds (I certainly don't miss the fuzzy look of older crt TVs for example).


Regarding shaders and filters: If you are good with shader languages and programming/scripting in general, you can write your own shader and use them with shader injectors on any game. Reshade, ENB and others might work, or might need recompiling for custom shaders, I don't know for sure. For example here is an easy to get article regarding crt filter creation that could get people going in making their own filters: CRT shader tutorial[www.gamasutra.com].

P.s. Chromatic abberation is like eye cancer (mostly because people overdo it and together with blur it simulates mild myopia and double vision). Cool for 80s analogue video trailers though.

[Chad "The King" ThunderCuck]

Originally posted by Spectrum Legacy:

Originally posted by marco.nadal.75:

Oh and Spectrum, if you haven't already, try ReShade's CRT filter for that authentic look ... unless you have an *actual* CRT.

P.s. Chromatic abberation is like eye cancer (mostly because people overdo it and together with blur it simulates mild myopia and double vision). Cool for 80s analogue video trailers though.

i can fully understand that way of thinking. look at deamons souls however for an example of CA being used properly. its basically ♥♥♥♥ tier anti aliasing.

[Robinson Drake]

Originally posted by Spectrum Legacy:

xBRZ is definitely better than HQ from my experience, but still this kind of filters are imo abominations which distort and ruin the original visuals of classic games.

You might as well complain about the loss of the dithering effect on the Mega Drive in Europe because of SCART...

I wonder how you'd feel about upscale programs being used in-industry. I bet you didn't even notice the sprites in the VGA version of Monkey Island had a scaler applied to them to convert them to a higher resolution before it even hit your screen.

[Spectrum Legacy]

Originally posted by Quark Bent:

You might as well complain about the loss of the dithering effect on the Mega Drive in Europe because of SCART...

I wonder how you'd feel about upscale programs being used in-industry. I bet you didn't even notice the sprites in the VGA version of Monkey Island had a scaler applied to them to convert them to a higher resolution before it even hit your screen.

My comment was regarding antialiased/'hires' filters and the unnatural look they produce. Do you like to use them? Good for you, just go for it. On the other hand, there are options to play it on the hardware that's at least close to the original one, which will provide the intended look. Options and preferences. Whatever happens to them poor pixels, I will sleep soundly, but I won't torture and butcher them any more than necessary!
Built-in upscalers are there usually for a good reason and if the game is designed from ground up with them in mind, what's there to object? (in general lowres scaling is a moot for me, because it differs between how the crt pcmonitor handles the scaling of picture vs rigid scaling on lcd ...it's like directly comparing specs of cinema projectors and home TVs) and even Monkey island vga version having a scaler applied? Which scaler? I really don't remember... It uses 320x200 256color vga mode13h, which you can directly output on crt supporting res of 320x200. Maybe you meant that low resolutions like this could be doublescanned if desired? In any case we digress a little, but I'm still curious.

[Robinson Drake]

Before I respond, I should say... I do hope that this discussion isn't too much of a derail for the original thread poster, Marco :)

Originally posted by Spectrum Legacy:

My comment was regarding antialiased/'hires' filters and the unnatural look they produce. Do you like to use them? Good for you, just go for it. On the other hand, there are options to play it on the hardware that's at least close to the original one, which will provide the intended look. Options and preferences. Whatever happens to them poor pixels, I will sleep soundly, but I won't torture and butcher them any more than necessary! :smile:

There's no need to paint pixels sympathetically. I get that you care for them as an aesthetic but what you suggest is rather... Idealistic and not realistic. I can maybe achieve a degree of accuracy but I won't really be able to check that without reference points, aka original hardware or a picture reference.

My point about the dithering effect was that you usually cannot 100% divine what the 'original intent' of the art was without looking at the original elements of design and presentation; the reason there is a dithering effect AT ALL on Sonic the Hedgehog's waterfalls was because of the low resolution screens that consoles targeted; the waterfalls were designed with that graphical artefacting in mind. Anyone playing it in on an emulator or with one of those fancy 720p-upscale SCART version of the MegaDrive don't get the dithering effect that was designed as intended; it just doesn't happen, the pixels remain unblended and sans artefaction.

http://emulation-general.wikia.com/wiki/Dithering

So, along comes someone with a 'pixel untouched' perspective; you're kind of like the SCART person here. Please excuse the assumptions that may imply, I merely mean 'you' for the sake of rhetoric, not actually you. You would think that that waterfall was designed like that for no other reason; but it wasn't designed for your SCART+720p upscale or the emulator... And there's nothing but research or prior experience to tell you that.

Anyone who claims to understand that there is a pixel untouched perspective to certain titles may be using selective bias to ignore design principles, ala dithering above, that do not fit into their preexisting hypotheses...

There's pixel accuracy of the RGB signal (non-dithered), which is what's preserved by emulation, and then there's aesthetic intent of the YUV presentation of the intended monitor (dithered, designed that way, aka, the INTENDED experience), which is not preserved by emulation. Even developers like Treasure have gone on record saying that they would rely on the dithering effect to get a better 'feel' of colour out of the Mega Drive; that's absent with 'RGB Pixel Perfect Accuracy'.

RGB pixel accuracy is not always the original YUV aesthetic intent and people really shouldn't confuse the two or profess to know the difference when they don't. I STILL don't really fully understand the difference but I at least acknowledge it exists.

I meet tonnes of people like this, who seem to preach that they knew exactly how the pixel art was presented when, really, they're coming decades later to the scene and only rarely do they have any real insight into the design of the games they defend. The main reason I've ever conceded the "shouldn't scale/filter" argument ever at all was with Doom and similar era PC titles, because they were originally NOT designed for YUV dithering and therefore was never designed with that kind of artefacted presentation in mind.

I really don't mean to sound or appear hostile at all, I'm just a bit sick of how it seems that people form this opinion they know how the pixels were meant to be; if someone with a European SCART Mega Drive hooked into a 720p upscale and a modern tv went and booted up a cart of Sonic and told me that 'this was how the game was meant to look, look at how clear and clean and crisp it all look', I'd just laugh and say "sure, those waterfalls no longer dither, totally how it was meant to look..."

Originally posted by Spectrum Legacy:

Built-in upscalers are there usually for a good reason and if the game is designed from ground up with them in mind, what's there to object? (in general lowres scaling is a moot for me, because it differs between how the crt pcmonitor handles the scaling of picture vs rigid scaling on lcd ...it's like directly comparing specs of cinema projectors and home TVs) and even Monkey island vga version having a scaler applied? Which scaler? I really don't remember... It uses 320x200 256color vga mode13h, which you can directly output on crt supporting res of 320x200. Maybe you meant that low resolutions like this could be doublescanned if desired? In any case we digress a little, but I'm still curious.

Ah, my grammar was a bit odd... I meant that they simply took the original EGA graphical sprites, put them through a upscaling process, rather than remake them from scratch. Then, presumably, they added the VGA colour spectrum. THEN they ended up in the game. There was no use of scalers as an in-game process (that I know of) in Monkey Island.

I brought it up because that people talk negatively about scalers without seeming to acknowledge the benefits they've had from them, mostly because these events would have gone unseen or even noticed as being due to that. It's all too easy to tarnish the name or worth of something like that. Even if you're an informed person who knows these things, expressing negativity towards scalers often causes a shepherd effect where people follow that blindly... And then I have to encounter those people ;) (which, I should clarify, you've been one of the most intelligent responders I've encountered about the topic!)

[Chad "The King" ThunderCuck]

Originally posted by Quark Bent:

Why stop at HQx when you can go xBRZ?

https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/xbrz/screenshots/xBRZ%2022.png/1
https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/xbrz/screenshots/ga.png/1

xbr is absolute trash on anything more detailed than the very basic sprites of mario and a skeleton. its especially disgusting on the backgrounds of every single game ever made.


for the absolute best shaders: use reshade. for 2d games id stick with reshade 2.xx if you can find one of the 2nd release versions still. otherwise mess with CA(chromatic abberasion), magic bloom, and gaussian blur.