Lordmonkus

The Retroarch Desmume core works very well for me, especially with a good shader to help with the graphics. I don't know how well it compares to the standalone in terms of accuracy but feature wise I like it better with the split screen placement options.

@SentaiBrad The latest Mednafen_PSX core for Retroarch now has 2x, 4x and 8x internal resolution settings in the core options. Just be aware that it is software driven and not hardware so it can be demanding, my AMD 8350 @ 4.0GHz can handle the 2x but not the 4x or 8x with all shaders off. As for a shader that works well with both have you seen this thread over at the Retroarch forums ? http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4964 It seems Hyllian is working on a shader setup to handle just this scenario you are talking about. Personally I have not messed with it because as I stated in the epsxe 2.0 thread I can't stand the 3D games of the 32-bit era so all I play on the PS1 is 2D based stuff. @fromlostdays Shaders are most definitely a personal taste / preference thing, that's why there's so many different shader options in Retroarch and finding that exact one you like can be so problematic. I know people that prefer shaders I cannot stand and at the same time they cant tolerate the shader that I think looks best, just like how some people love to streatch their games to 16:9 instead of playing a game in its natural aspect ratio. The smoother shader styles like xBR and Sabr do have a neat effect on cartoonish games like Mario and Zelda (Super Mario World 2: Yoshis Island looks really cool with a smoothing shader). But games that have a more "realistic" look like Final Fantasy 3 and Contra 3 those shaders really start to look bad IMHO. The first screen shot I posted above to me is a good balance between a smoothed shader with just enough scanline to help break it up a little. I hope this thread gets some more screenshots and discussion to hopefully help some new people find that right shader look they like in their game.

Yeah these pixel / scanline based shaders do not work on 3D games at all. You are best using internal resolution scaling for those types of games. I agree with you on the rounded pixel shaders, they just aren't my cup of tea. Thats why the first screenshot I posted isn't my daily driver shader but as far as a shader that does do some rounding it actually isn't terrible. As for the scanlines, the reason I love the scanlines is because it just breaks up the harsh edges that just straight scaling brings without doing any of the smoothing stuff I don't like. I also agree with you on the proper mathematical upscale, that's why I set integer scale to on in retroarch (these screenshots were taken with it off though). The other important factor in shaders and how they look is the calibration of the display. I went through the calibration on my TV and it made a fairly significant difference in how my games looked on it. Bad calibration can totally wreck the way a shader is supposed to look. After calibration the modified Hyllian-Glow shader looked way better.

Doing a quick search I couldn't find any threads on the shaders people here use so I thought I would start one up with a couple of screens of the ones I like and use. None of these shaders I use are stock default of the built in presets but are instead modified based on reading through the Retroarch and Shmups forums. It's crazy how different shaders look on different displays, the differences can be quite drastic. For example the PVM lookalike shader at the bottom looks amazingly good on my 22" monitor which just an average run of the mill Samsung but on my 42" Samsung TV it looks absolutely atrocious. Also the PVM vs the Hyllian-Glow look very similar but the performace difference is drastically different. This is a modified CRT-Lottes shader with a 4xBR layer and tweaked a little. This is not my daily driver shader but I do like the way it looks. This a modified CRT-Hyllian-Glow which I use on my lower end laptop outputting to my TV. This shader is extremely performance friendly. This is a heavily modified CRT-Royale which is supposed to mimic a PVM. This is my preferred shader to use on my main gaming PC and it is not performance friendly at all. My poor laptop slows to about 15-20 fps with this preset

You are right about the foundation part but I believe that the game devs jumped the gun so to speak, they switched too early for the vast majority of games. The hardware just wasn't there yet to do it, the 64 bit N64 handled it much better. A perfect example of what I mean is Final Fantasy 7. A great game by anyones standards but would have been even better if it was done with pure sprite art instead of a godawful hybrid. I absolutely loved the previous FF games but I could not for the life of me tolerate the hideous mess that 7 was. The gameplay design around 3d games was actually implemented quite well from the start, it was just that the hardware couldn't push the polygons and texture quality needed yet. Now where the 3D stuff really did push and lay the foundation properly was in the racing games and the cartoony 3D platformers like Spyro and Crash Badicoot. It was just too bad they tried to shoehorn too many game genres into 3D where the hardware wasn't quite ready (even for foundation purposes).

The new 2.0 version of ePSXe is most definitely worth upgrading to over 1.9.xx. The base GPU video core is a vast improvement over the old Soft driver. You can now scale the resolution if you want (2x and 4x), adjust brightness levels if needed and has hyllians and lottes awesome shaders built right in with zero performance hit. This for me is by far the best way to run 2d sprite based games with a retro feel without being too blocky and ugly from upscaling. The old Soft plugin caused major issues for me on my amd powered laptop and was unusable. One other great feature of this new version is the ability to have a per game settings so you can have a setup for 3d games and a setup for 2d sprite games. As for switching from Retroarch using the mednafen core to ePSXe 2.0 that's going to come down to personal preference. Personally I wouldn't bother, RA just has way better options with the shaders being much better looking, the RA menu for quicksave management and easier disk swap from the couch with a controller. Performance wise ePSXe is much better than RA (Medanfen). On my relatively lowend laptop hooked up to the TV I cannot run RA (Mednafen). The performance just isn't quite there, games run about 49-50 fps even with zero shaders. ePSXe however with hyllians shader runs at a full 60fps butter smooth. On my laptop I use ePSXe and on my gaming computer will stick to using Retroarch Mednafen and an awesome tweaked out shader preset that looks amazing on 2d games. I don't play any 3d stuff from that era, it's just too damned ugly for me to go back to. I hated that era of gaming when I went through it back then and I hate it even more now. The 32-bit era should have been about amazing sprite work and cd audio over horrible low polygon count and extremely low grade textures.