Best Retroarch Shader for Sega Game Gear

[chicomandell]

I have been able to install overlays and shaders for all of the Gameboy variations and get them looking pretty close to the actual physical screen appearance.  There doesn't appear to be one for Sega Game Gear in Retroarch or elsewhere.  I've searched on the web and on this site, as well as libretro's site and haven't found any information on this.  I wanted to see what others are using for their Game Gear and Atari Lynx shaders to get it close to the physical screen look.

[Lordmonkus]

Oooh, that's a tough one.

I don't do any game gear stuff at all and while I do have Lynx stuff I never touch it. I have tried different shaders but never found anything to my personal like but the best thing I can tell you is to just experiment with different presets til you find one you like. You can try in the handheld presets folder as a start.

I guess a big thing with them is just how big are trying to scale them up to ? If you are trying to go something close to full screen on a 1080 or higher monitor things are gonna start getting really big because those screens are really low resolution. If you go with a smaller window and some sort of handheld overlay to fit around it you may get a better look as well.

[chicomandell]

Yeah I found an overlay that makes the screen smaller with a image of the game gear handheld.  I just haven't been able to get the right look for the crappy LCD screen that the GameGear had.  I'll keep playing around with the settings and let you all know if I find anything.

[Lordmonkus]

Just out of curiosity though, what games are you wanting to play on the GameGear that arent available on the Master System ? I know a great many GG games were just Master System ports and the Master System stuff looks better full screened.

[chicomandell]

I probably won't be playing many games all the way through.  It's more just for nostalgia than anything else I guess.  It was really cool to be able to see the gameboy games in the lame green tint with a gameboy overlay on them.  I had the gamegear years later as a hand me down and loved playing it.  It'd be cool to have it look like the old gamegear system.  Something to show off to friends and stuff like that.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I can see that. It's just that the Game Gear really was just Master System hardware crammed into a handheld and so many games really were just Master System games. The Gameboy was at least its own hardware and games.

I owned a Game Gear way back in the day back in high school, didn't have it all that long before I got rid of it again. Tried to play Sonic on it but the screen blur was so terrible, Mortal Kombat was a surprisingly good port however.

[Zombeaver]

I've not tried Game Gear specifically, but I know there are some great Game Boy and Game Boy Advance shaders that give the image a handheld border and decrease the image size like what you mention - they actually filter the image itself as well though to look like the screen of the device. I would think there would be a similar version for GameGear. I believe the ones I use are in the "Handheld -> Console Border" folder. Based on the Github there's a Game Gear version. "gg-2x.cgp" - "gg-6x.cgp". Is this the one you're currently using?

[chicomandell]

Thanks, I had previously tried those and for some reason certain games that I tested ran really slow when those shaders were loaded.  The best I could find was from the built in shaders, I used "lcd3x.cgp" under the "shaders\shaders_cg\handheld" folder.  That seems to be the closest to the real LCD effect that I could find.

[Lordmonkus]

Shaders will have an impact depending on your GPU. Some shaders are heavier than others. While emulation itself is CPU dependent for every emulator out there shaders are all handled by your graphics card.