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[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I just use the Kurozumi edit of Royale, it was designed to replicate a high quality Sony PVM which is what many of todays retro enthusiasts consider the best CRT display. It is also generally what the game developers at the time designed their games on. Though when it comes to shaders there is a lot of personal preference in what people like. The CRT look is just the look I like, I know Brad like his upscaled sharp pixels so he uses the Pixellate shader which does have an interesting look but not one I like. One thing to keep in mind though if you do go with one of the CRT type of shaders is to make sure you enable "integer scaling" in the video settings. With it off the scanlines may look off because of the oddball scaling of non integer.

[djwar]

I found CRT-Royale folder but not Kurozumi

[Lordmonkus]

CRT-Royale is in the CRT folder but the Kurozumi version is tucked away in the CGP folder. Weird place for it since it is a CRT shader and just an edit of Royale. Also there is only a CG version and not a GL version.

[djwar]

lordmonkus said CRT-Royale is in the CRT folder but the Kurozumi version is tucked away in the CGP folder. Weird place for it since it is a CRT shader and just an edit of Royale. Also there is only a CG version and not a GL version.

CGP folder, has 3 empty folders nothing else . CRT royale has many shaders wich one ? How do I save em ? I clicked apply shader changes - save config - exit , go back in and shader passes is in 0. something is fishy here

[Lordmonkus]

I assume you have your RA set to per core settings. Load a game for the core you wish to have the shader you wasnt. With a game loaded bring up the RA menu then "Load Shader Preset", then navigate to the CG folder then CGP folder and it should be in there. Retroarch should then appear to stall for a second or 2 but it is fine. Then you can exit back out of the RA menu back to your game and the shader should now be in effect. If it is not try repeating the process but click "Apply Changes" before going back into the game. You may also have to update your shaders using RA's updater, make sure to update the CG shaders. If it still does not work you just may not be able to use CG shaders for whatever reason and you will the be forced into the GLSL shaders. In GLSL try out the Lottes or Hyllian shaders, they are really nice. You could try out the standard Royale but in my experience results with that shader vary wildly from looking pretty good to downright awful, it all depends on your monitor and its settings and colour calibration.

[djwar]

yes, I do have it set to per core settings, I was watching one of Brads videos and following what he was doing.. what do you think is better in this case? Edit. Not showing in RA but internal folder has it ...

[DOS76]

To save the shaders as presets go to Shader Preset save as in the menu and click x then it will have you type in a name to save it as I always use the shader name myself then when you go into your shaders your presets will exist outside of the folders and that is when they can be toggled through.

[Lordmonkus]

Saving presets is more for your own custom combinations of shaders by applying layers and tweaks that you want. When you use an already existing preset there is no reason to save it again as a preset. But what you can do to save some time once you find a shader preset you do like for one core it will save it as a preset in the parent tree with that core in the name and you can just load that for any other core you load. You can then go in and copy one of those system presets to a name you want like "Favourite Preset" or whatever you wanna call it.

[DOS76]

All I know is that is where they must be to be able to cycle through them in my experience. If you know how to do so another way that's great too Edit LordMonkus is right though you don't have to save them you can actually just go into the folders and copy them to your main shader folder and then you can quickly cycle through

[Lordmonkus]

The presets buried a folder or 2 deep are slightly different than the preset files saved out in the parent tree. The ones down in if you open it up in notepad and look at it are looking for a relative patch to the different shader effects where the ones saved out in the parent folder are looking for a hard path for the different effects. I really need to do a video tutorial on this stuff some time, would be so much easier than trying to explain it in text.

[DOS76]

Okay lets make sure I'm getting you in the shader folder there are two sharder folders one is glsl the other is the CG inside of both of these folders there are many folders like crt, 3dfx, retro... inside of these folders are individual shaders now these aren't the ones that you are are talking about needing the relative path are they they are the same ones I copy to the parent folder and they work fine for me when cycling through.

[Lordmonkus]

I will try my best to explain this, it's something I understand in my head but I have a hard time putting it into words. In the shaders folder there are 2 folders, 1 called shaders_cg and the other called shaders_glsl. For the most part in these folders they contain all the same shaders with the difference being the framework they were built on. The CG stuff is built off of an Nvidia framework and GLSL is built off of OpenGL, the OpenGL is more compatible across systems. Other than that i'm really not sure what the differences really are. I just tend to use CG stuff since I have an Nvidia card. Anyways back on topic. In the shaders folder you will over time as you load up presets for a core you will find new preset files created with a name like "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp" for example. These are essentially the same preset file as the one you loaded in the first place but if you open it up in notepad you will see all the shader pass paths as an absolute path like: shader0 = "H:\Emulation\Emulators\Retroarch But if you were to go into the actual preset you loaded in the first place and open the preset in notepad it would look like a totally different file. If you dig into the shaders folders you will see files with the file extentsions of .cg, .cgp, .glsl and .glslp. The first obvious difference is that one is a CG shader and the other is a GLSL shader. The biggest difference though is the ones that ends with "p" is a preset which is a combination of shader passes to give the desired look. These presets can have as few as 1 shader pass and something like Royale or the Kurozumi edit of Royale can have as many as 12 separate passes giving a very complex but amazing look while at the same time can be being very taxing on the system. The best way I can think of to describe how shader passes work is to think of them like transparencies like you used to see in high school (depending on how old you are I guess, I don't know) or Photoshop layers. Each pass is a different shader effect applied to the one below it and each one of those passes is an actual .cg or .glsl shader file. The .cg and .glsl files are the actual shader files, these are the files where the real work is done where the presets are merely instructions to package a group of shaders together with some settings and the order to load them. Now that all that shit is explained to the best of my ability what I would suggest you do is load up a core and generate that core preset in the shaders folder like the example I showed earlier "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp". Rename this file to something that makes sense to you like "Testing1.cgp". Now load in a different preset and generate a new preset file and again rename it something like "Testing2.cgp". Obviously name these to something that makes sense to you so that you know which shader it really is. Once you have a few shaders pulled out that way you can then cycle through them on the fly and see the differences in them very quickly and clearly. One other little side benefit of all of this is these presets you have now in the "shaders" folder is that you manually edit values in the preset file using notepad or you can actually edit them within Retroarch itself by opening up the quick menu and where you load presets there is an option there called "Menu Shader Parameters". After you make changes be sure to apply changes and it will be changed in the preset file located in the "shaders" folder. Anyways I hope all of this made sense. If not just ask and I will try and make it a bit more simple and easy to understand.

[DOS76]

I'm guessing that most of that at the end is for the OP as I'm already doing that. I just don't use any per core shader configs personally. The other stuff about the glsl glsp being that the p files have built in parameter was very informative though thanks.

[Lordmonkus]

I just wrote it all out as a general guide / primer for people who just happen to read it. I just let my fingers hammer the keys while I thought about it rather than try and pick it all apart for anyone specifically

[djwar]

lordmonkus said The presets buried a folder or 2 deep are slightly different than the preset files saved out in the parent tree. The ones down in if you open it up in notepad and look at it are looking for a relative patch to the different shader effects where the ones saved out in the parent folder are looking for a hard path for the different effects. I really need to do a video tutorial on this stuff some time, would be so much easier than trying to explain it in text.

Please do, that will be much easier...

[djwar]

lordmonkus said I will try my best to explain this, it's something I understand in my head but I have a hard time putting it into words. In the shaders folder there are 2 folders, 1 called shaders_cg and the other called shaders_glsl. For the most part in these folders they contain all the same shaders with the difference being the framework they were built on. The CG stuff is built off of an Nvidia framework and GLSL is built off of OpenGL, the OpenGL is more compatible across systems. Other than that i'm really not sure what the differences really are. I just tend to use CG stuff since I have an Nvidia card. Thank you for clearing this out.. ! Anyways back on topic. In the shaders folder you will over time as you load up presets for a core you will find new preset files created with a name like "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp" for example. These are essentially the same preset file as the one you loaded in the first place but if you open it up in notepad you will see all the shader pass paths as an absolute path like: shader0 = "H:\Emulation\Emulators\Retroarch But if you were to go into the actual preset you loaded in the first place and open the preset in notepad it would look like a totally different file. If you dig into the shaders folders you will see files with the file extentsions of .cg, .cgp, .glsl and .glslp. The first obvious difference is that one is a CG shader and the other is a GLSL shader. The biggest difference though is the ones that ends with "p" is a preset which is a combination of shader passes to give the desired look. These presets can have as few as 1 shader pass and something like Royale or the Kurozumi edit of Royale can have as many as 12 separate passes giving a very complex but amazing look while at the same time can be being very taxing on the system. That answer my question, remember I was asking before how to save em, it was because I had a preset with pixellate.glslp and I was trying to add more passes, so pixellate does not allow to add more The best way I can think of to describe how shader passes work is to think of them like transparencies like you used to see in high school (depending on how old you are I guess, I don't know) or Photoshop layers. Each pass is a different shader effect applied to the one below it and each one of those passes is an actual .cg or .glsl shader file. The .cg and .glsl files are the actual shader files, these are the files where the real work is done where the presets are merely instructions to package a group of shaders together with some settings and the order to load them. Now that all that shit is explained to the best of my ability what I would suggest you do is load up a core and generate that core preset in the shaders folder like the example I showed earlier "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp". Rename this file to something that makes sense to you like "Testing1.cgp". Now load in a different preset and generate a new preset file and again rename it something like "Testing2.cgp". Obviously name these to something that makes sense to you so that you know which shader it really is. Once you have a few shaders pulled out that way you can then cycle through them on the fly and see the differences in them very quickly and clearly. OK OK.. lets see, I have right now genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll and mupen64plus_libretro.dll, so it means I can cycle throu presets on the fly NOT shaders, right? each preset off course will save different shaders inside.. Am I right ? One other little side benefit of all of this is these presets you have now in the "shaders" folder is that you manually edit values in the preset file using notepad or you can actually edit them within Retroarch itself by opening up the quick menu and where you load presets there is an option there called "Menu Shader Parameters". After you make changes be sure to apply changes and it will be changed in the preset file located in the "shaders" folder. isn't easier if you could just copy paste it here, so I can copy it ? Anyways I hope all of this made sense. If not just ask and I will try and make it a bit more simple and easy to understand.

it did, thank you for taking the time to teach me lordmonkus.. and just for you guys to know , Im Spanish speaker, so maybe it gets... a little more complicated to understand it

[Lordmonkus]

Ok good, I am glad what I typed out made sense somewhat to someone other than myself. This is one of those things I am by no means an expert on but I think have a basic grasp of the main concepts of how it all works. I think I understand it in my head and I try and put it all down in words as I think of it and it makes sense as I type it. I will try and answer your latest questions. You can add more passes to a preset but the problem there is that can only easily add them at the end without some extensive hands on dirty work. After you have loaded in a preset if you look in the Quick Menu > Shaders you will see a list of all the different passes that make up the preset. You will see the number of total passes, if you highlight that and press right on the controller you can add more total passes. Then scroll down and you will see the passes you have added but there will be no shader shown, it will say something like Shader #13 N/A for example. The last number will be different depending on how many passes the preset you had loaded in had before, I used 13 because the Kurozumi preset I use has 12 passes so adding one more gives it 13. Now to actually add another pass you go to the new pass you just added and press B on your controller and you will then dig into the shaders folder structure til you find the shader (not preset) that you wish to add. This is where you are looking for either a .cg or .glsl file (not .cgp or .glslp) Simply adding more passes to a preset may or may not give you the desired effect you may be looking for. Most presets are actually extremely good and the people who have created them have done a very good job of fine tuning to get the desired look. Further tweaking them and actually knowing what does what is well beyond my scope of knowledge. I simply know enough to edit them and make them look shitty. When you use the cycle hotkey to change shaders you are simply cycling through the presets that are currently in the Retroarch > Shaders folder and not the ones in the shaders_cg and shaders_glsl folders. I'm not quite sure I understand your question about me copy pasting here. What is it you are asking me to copy paste ? I was just pointing out something you could do within a preset to further tweak certain settings to customize a shader preset to your liking. This is actually how the Kurozumi edit of CRT-Royale came about, he just used Royale as a base and then further tweaked the values in the preset folder. Just to reiterate here. Shaders themselves are actually somewhat complicated code (sort of like a programming language but not as complicated) that directly modifys the image output on the screen. Dig into the shaders folder structure and open one of the .cg or .glsl files in notepad and take a look at it, you will lots of programming code in there. Presets are simpler and easier to understand and they are just what their name implys, they are presets of shader combinations to achieve a desired look. Think of the shader itself as something like the actual source code of a program and the presets are like the settings menu in a program or an .ini file where you can easily tweak settings. Edit: You can build your own preset using the shader files themselves. Simply load up a core and if you already have a preset loaded just set the number of passes to 0 and then Apply Changes, you should now have no shader effects at all. Now you can start adding passes and for each pass load up a shader file, again these are .cg and .glsl files not .cgp and .glslp. Each shader you add will change based on the shader that is in the pass above (in the list or lower in pass number). Like I said in my previous post, think of each pass like a Photoshop layer or like sheets of transparent plastic and each sheet has a different effect. Some combinations will look good and some will look terrible. Any further information on this stuff is way beyond my knowledge base.

[djwar]

What I meant by copy paste is, the values in the preset file using notepad. For instance: shaders = "1" feedback_pass = "0" shader0 = "E:\............................... wrap_mode0 = "clamp_to_border" mipmap_input0 = "false" alias0 = "" float_framebuffer0 = "false" You can copy yours here, and I can paste it in mine, that ll work right ?

[Lordmonkus]

Theoretically yes but you would have to go in and manually edit all those absolute paths for each shader pass because more than likely the folder structure would be different. Plus all I am using is the default non edited CRT-Royale_Kurozumi preset so if you load that you would be using the exact shader I am using.

[djwar]

yeah just for the preset you recommended me before, i wanna try it out I use nviadia shaders also