Two fairly new shaders have popped up that are worth mentioning: TroggleMonkey's CRT-Royale and leilei's 3dfx. They're both available in Cg format in
libretro's common-shaders github repo, though CRT-Royale utilizes some advanced features that aren't available in RetroArch v1.0.0.2 (the most recent release at the time of this writing).
CRT-Royale is particularly exciting for me because TroggleMonkey managed to overcome some issues with shadow-mask emulation that I thought were totally intractable at current common resolutions (i.e., 1080p). The result is some really great phosphor emulation at reasonable scale factors, along with all of the bells and whistles users have come to expect from CRT shaders, including "halation"/glow, bob-deinterlacing support and curvature, along with a ton of options that are unique to this shader.
I'm not going to cover many of them here because it would take forever to get screenshots and there's not much point when TroggleMonkey has included a very informative README with the code, along with support for RetroArch's new runtime parameter support (so you can see the effect of your changes in real-time). However, I thought the shadow mask stuff was super-cool and deserved some closeups. Here's a shot of the shader with default settings (as always, click to embiggen):
First, we'll look at my favorite effect, the in-line shadow mask (called slot-mask in the code):
This is the same configuration I was shooting for with my PhosphorLUT shader, and you can see that the configuration of the phosphors has that familiar vertical, staggered orientation:
Next, we have the very similar aperture grille:
The main difference between this and the in-line slot mask is that it doesn't have the slight staggering (only really visible in the closeups and at super-huge resolutions). In closeup of the LUT, you can see that it just removes the crossbars between triads:
Last, we have the dot-triad shadow mask (called "shadow-mask-EDP" in the code), which was common on CRT computer monitors:
As you can see, it looks very similar to
the high-res shots I took of my Compaq CRT monitor (from my
emulation/TV post). And here's the dot-triad blown up:
The other shader I wanted to show is leilei's 3dfx shader, which tries to mimic the effects of a 3dfx GPU, known for some distinctive dithering among other things. In addition to obvious applications like RetroArch's Quake core, Nintendo's N64 also used a GPU that was very similar to a 3dfx, which makes it appropriate for RA's Mupen64plus core. When run at low-ish internal resolutions and paired with RetroArch's per-texture 3-point filtering, you can get a pretty good approximation of what N64s looked like.
Here are some shots of the shader at 320x240 and 640x480 (i.e., native and double res, respectively):
Native res:
Double internal res:
As you can see, the doubled res looks significantly sharper, but the scanlines are thinner and less pronounced (and twice as many of them) relative to the native res. I also like native res because it makes HUD/menu items look a little less "pasted-on":
Native res:
Doubled internal res:
