CRT Shaders for Almost Any Emulator or Game

[Lordmonkus]

Do you like CRT scanlines but some emulators or retro pixel art games such as Shovel Knight or Axiom Verge just doesn't have any options for it ? Well there is a way to get the effect using SweetFX / Reshade which is a post processing injector.

I am going to start with a disclaimer first though. This is something that is by no means as a good as Retroarchs or Mames shaders and is greatly effected by the resolution of the program using it and you may need to do some manual tweaking to suit your resolution and tastes. I am also no expert with this and I am only providing a tutorial on how to get this working but keep in mind it may not work with everything and there will be some leg work on your end. I am also going to be providing a zip file containing what you need and is a combination of SweetFX and Reshade. There are other versions of SweetFX and Reshade available on the net but this was the best version I found a while back that works best for retro gaming. SweetFX and Reshade are meant more for modern gaming and not really made for CRT effects on retro games so there is very little out there for this type of stuff.

Download the attached zip file (bottom of this post) and extract it anywhere you want on your system. Inside the zip file you will see a ReShade SweetFX folder and in that folder you will see a bunch of files and folders.Before going further I highly recommend opening up 2 file manager windows, one for this SweetFX folder and the other for the program you are going to be injecting the shaders to. This will make it easier to see what files get copied over so you know what files to delete if you don't like the effect.

You will want to run the ReShade Setup.exe and then you will see this window.Click the Select Game button and browse to the game or programs executable you want to use this on. It will try and autodetect which API the game / emulator uses but it is very unlikely that it will succeed and you will need to know if the game or emulator is using OpenGL or one of the D3D choices. If you pick the wrong one this will not work at all and you will need to try again with a different choice. If it does auto detect it will automatically copy some files to the folder of the program you are injecting the shaders into.

The files that will be copied are:
Sweet.fx
ReShade.fx
either an opengl or dx .dll file (this will depend on the api the program is using)
and a SweetFX folder

If you are unhappy with the effect simply remove the copied over files and folder.

Now before moving on you should test and see if you picked the correct API. Run the game or emulator and if it did work you will see a bunch of text in the top left corner of your screen or window of the program. You may or may not need to actually load game if using this on an emulator.

If you do not see any extra text in the top left you most likely picked the wrong API so delete the files that were copied over and rerun the ReShade Setup.exe and pick a different API and try the game / program again. If you try all the different APIs and you don't ever see any text on startup it may just be an incompatible game or program. One game that I could not get it work with was Volgarr the Viking.

Once you do have it so you have the text showing it is working we now need to get the scanline preset put in. Go to your folder where you have your ReShade Setup.exe and then navigate to the CRT Presets folder, then sweetfx settings folder.

In each of these folders is a SweetFX_settings.txt file, this is the pre configured pre set. I personally like the Jinx_Original but you can try out the other ones to see which you prefer. Just copy the SweetFX_settings.txt file over to the SweetFX folder that was created in game / program folder.

Run your game or emulator again and you should now see the scanline effect in action. Keep in mind though that the exact effect will be affected by the resolution of the program / game. You can toy around with the SweetFX_settings.txt you copied over by opening it in notepad (or Notepad++) and scroll down to the Advanced CRT settings section. The line you will want to tinker with is:
#define CRTResolution        1.5

You will want to make changes a decimal at a time so 1.6 to 1.7 to 1.8. You do not want to make relatively big changes at all. You can also make changes on the fly with the game / program running if you have a multi monitor setup or you can tab in and out. Make a change and save the txt file and you should immediately see it change in game.

Remember if you don't like the effect you can always delete the files that got inserted into the game / emulator folder and you will be good to go again. Also before you even think of using this with the stand alone version of Mednafen it will be awful. It does indeed work but because of the resolution of the emulator there is an atrocious "melting pixel" effect that is caused by the "greeting" text of ReShade and there is no way of disabling the greeting text because the makers of it don't want people stealing and distributing it for money.

If you have questions about the detailed working of all of this stuff you are on your own to do some research on it. I am not qualified enough at all to talk about it. I am only providing this as an option for people if they want to try it out. There are other SweetFX only and ReShade only packages out there but this combined package is the only one I found that was easy to get scanlines working with relative reliability.

ReShade SweetFX.7z

[The_Keeper86]

I'm having a very difficult time getting this to work with PCSX2 have you tried? It just crashes PCSX2 for me

[Lordmonkus]

I have not.

[The_Keeper86]

I got it working despite Reshade showing an error in red. I found a nice Sweetfx setting for PCSX2 on their forum but of course it doesn't want to work

[donkeyjack]

How do you delete it from Mednafen? I did a horrible mistake

[Lordmonkus]

Simply delete the files it added to your Mednafen folder.

The files that will be copied are:
Sweet.fx
ReShade.fx
either an opengl or dx .dll file (this will depend on the api the program is using)
and a SweetFX folder

I actually recently updated my Mednafen and tried out the "goat" shader it has built in and is quite nice.
To enable it look in the mednafen config file for the following:

;Enable specified OpenGL shader.
ss.shader

and change it to:

;Enable specified OpenGL shader.
ss.shader goat

Make sure you aren't using any scaling at all or it will bugger it all up and look silly.