Good Retroarch video settings for Saturn Mednafen

[ckp]

Hi 

I'm trying to improve the way my Saturn games look when run in Mednafen RA. 

I am running on 1920x1080 and want to keep fullscreen. There are a lot of video settings in this core that I'm not at all clear on which ones may help.

I have a pretty good i5 CPU and nvidia 1070 video card.

can anyone suggest some things that might make it look better, not using shaders, at least not yet?

Thanks.

 

[Lordmonkus]

If you don't want to use shaders there isn't much you can do about it at all. There is no resolution scaling for 3D games at all and from what have read I don't think there are any plans for it either but of course that may change somewhere down the road, who knows.

[ckp]

Ahh. It looked a lot better to me with SSF and my video settings there, but i don't want to use SSF anymore for Saturn.

So none of those video settings in the core can't help? 

If not, can you suggest a shader that might clean it up a little more? Right now it is super grainy and jagged full screen 16:9.

[Lordmonkus]

Personally I would start by putting the ratio to core provided, the for a shader play around with some of the CRT shaders like easymode-halation or one of the hyllian ones, or you can even try out the Royale-Kurozumi in the CGP folder. Shaders are obviously a personal preference thing and people like different ones.

Just a word of warning though that integer scaling on or off can have an effect on some of the crt looking shaders so if something looks off check to make sure that integer scale is on. Integer scale on though will give you some black borders on the top and bottom and at 1080 resolution some people don't like how big they can be.

[ckp]

Thanks @lordmonkus , setting the ratio to core provided is better. 

Can any of these settings help:

threaded video

integer scale

hw bilinear filtering

hard cpu sync and hard cpu sync frames

??

[Lordmonkus]

Threaded video is only to be used if you need a little bit extra speed to get games running at 100% speed, side effect of possible input lag. Only do this one as a last resort.

Integer scale has no gameplay effect, it's purely a visual thing. Depending on the scanline shader being used it can cause weirdness of the scaling is set to off.

HW Bilinear Filtering adds a slight blurring effect. I turn it off but its a personal preference thing, try it on and off and see which you prefer.

Hard GPU Sync should always be turned on, it reduces input lag. Leave the frames at 0 but if you are finding emulation speed is not quite 100% set it to 1.

If you do find you aren't quite 100% speed set Hard GPU Sync Frames to 1 first then if needed try turning on Threaded Video.

[ckp]

Thanks a lot! Now that I finally figured out setting my xarcade and xbox360 controllers simultaneously or one or the other in RA, i can really start getting into using it more!

[Lordmonkus]

Hehe good times ahead then

[Porl Hendy]

Thanks for this @lordmonkus this info will help me alot

[Lordmonkus]

Here's a fairly decent but simple guide on settings for Retroarch, it won't go into every detail and setting but it will give a pertty good understanding of the basics and need to know information.

http://www.powerup.io/gaming/emulators/retroarch