I'm trying to find a good CRT shader for #RetroArch to preserve transparency effects (like the waterfalls in Sonic 2) and dithering. The problem is, a lot of shaders that are lightweight enough (easymode, lottes-fast, etc.) don't seem to do the trick, the ones that work well (sonkun, royale) are too heavy for the hardware, and some that might be solid contenders are made for 1080p+ resolutions and create giant, goofy scanlines at 480p.
The #handhelds are so easy with the lcd-v2-color shaders, but finding a good CRT shader for home console #emulation has been tough with this device.
@andregil Kinda! Most of the 16-bit and prior emulators have built-in blargg NTSC filters, and that did the trick for me without harming performance. It's not like a proper shader, but it gives me the effect I wanted.
@andregil The 2S is powerful enough that you could probably run some actual shaders. Check out Retro Crisis on YouTube, he makes shaders and also talks about other shaders, you might have some luck getting his to run without a performance hit, but I'm not 100% sure about that. My favorite shaders are Sonkun's shaders, but I suspect they might be a little heavy for a Retroid.
@ADHDefy thanks! I've tested a few that come bundled with RetroArch and most seem to run well. Gonna try Retro Crisis' and Sonkun's ones, they look amazing 🤩
@ADHDefy
I use an RP2+ and spent quite a bit of time trying to find a good shader.
I ran into the same problems you did - CRT shaders aren't made for a 480p device. all 480 scanlines are used to render the games, and there's really no room left to render the CRT artifacts.
I ended up using shader: interpolation > bandlimit-pixel, then tweaking smoothness in the shader params per-console. This gives a good smoothness to remove the jaggies and makes pixels look even, when not integer scaling.
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