display

[2ball]

What is everybody using for a display?

I am on a 27-inch gaming monitor 144 MHz and I can't say that any games look good.

Maybe my memory is off and they always looked bad?

 

 

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, 2ball said:

What is everybody using for a display?

I am on a 27-inch gaming monitor 144 MHz and I can't say that any games look good.

Maybe my memory is off and they always looked bad?

 

 

I wouldnt say they look bad, its just that they are blown up to a higher res. The original consoles were likely 240p for 16 bit and back, and 240p/480p  for 32bit up. so its being stretched to a higher resolution on current displays. And the display tech has changed obviously, you are not using a crt these days.

[dragon57]

I know this isn't a solution to games looking worse on modern displays, but some people use shaders to try and recreate the 'look' from old CRTs. If done correctly, your brain will be tricked into filling in some gaps created by the shaders. Just a thought, and of course you need to use emulators that support these shaders. Retroarch is a good one to try if you decide to go down this road. MAME standalone also supports a number of shader effects.

[2ball]

I may need a cabinet and a joystick set up, to capture some of the nostalgia.

The games are almost unplayable now.

Maybe I'll search for an old CRT monitor.

 

 

[2ball]

2 minutes ago, dragon57 said:

I know this isn't a solution to games looking worse on modern displays, but some people use shaders to try and recreate the 'look' from old CRTs. If done correctly, your brain will be tricked into filling in some gaps created by the shaders. Just a thought, and of course you need to use emulators that support these shaders. Retroarch is a good one to try if you decide to go down this road. MAME standalone also supports a number of shader effects.

I remember one effect that put scan lines in the screen

 

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, dragon57 said:

I know this isn't a solution to games looking worse on modern displays, but some people use shaders to try and recreate the 'look' from old CRTs. If done correctly, your brain will be tricked into filling in some gaps created by the shaders. Just a thought, and of course you need to use emulators that support these shaders. Retroarch is a good one to try if you decide to go down this road. MAME standalone also supports a number of shader effects.

Yeah i use crt shaders myself for that very reason.

[Lordmonkus]

8 minutes ago, 2ball said:

I remember one effect that put scan lines in the screen

 

A good CRT effect shader on a high resolution display looks extremely good and close to a good quality CRT display.

Here is how my HLSL settings in Mame look:

[2ball]

that looks good.

are those settings in the mame emulator?

[dragon57]

Yes, you can go crazy twiddling with all the settings in MAME. Here is a YouTube video where the person really goes all out with different settings. Here it is just to give you an idea.

If you are in the old MAME vector games, you can also tweak MAME to give a pretty convincing scanning vector effect. Here is an example.

 

[Lordmonkus]

34 minutes ago, 2ball said:

that looks good.

are those settings in the mame emulator?

Yes, Mame has HLSL (and BGFX) shader support built in. I personally prefer the HLSL and here is a download for my settings, has raster and vector settings that I think look best but are fully tweak-able for personal tastes.

Retroarch also has its own full suite of shader options including CRT effects. Other emulators though have at best basic CRT shaders and in my opinion do not look so good.

[2ball]

do I just swap them out with the current raster and vector files?

[Lordmonkus]

Yes, make a backup of your old ones first just in case you hate mine.

 

[2ball]

I'm not getting the lines.

I tried several setups, currently, only the raster and vector files are in the ini folder.

[Lordmonkus]

Did you enable HLSL in your mame.ini ?

To use this simply enable HLSL in your mame.ini by setting hlsl_enable to 1 instead of 0 and dropping this raster.ini file into your \Mame\ini\presets folder. Backup your old one first just in case you do not like this one.

[2ball]

where should mame.ini be?  I did a search and it did not come up.

that's the file that I make 1 instead of 0?

[Lordmonkus]

It may be in your /ini folder but it should be the main folder where your Mame executable is located, if it is in the /ini folder move it out to the main folder.

[2ball]

I don't think I have it.

Is this to file I have to create on the command bar?

[Lordmonkus]

You have to have one, Mame generates one when you run it. Maybe you got file extensions hidden and can't see it.

[2ball]

The ini folder has presets and the 2 files I got from you.

then there is  plugin.ini and in.ini on the page with the EXE file.

I did a computer search for mame.ini and nothing came up.

 

Still looking.  using mame64.  the file will be mame.ini correct?

 

[Lordmonkus]

1 minute ago, 2ball said:

the file will be mame.ini correct?

That is correct.

If one actually doesn't exist you can generate one, check out my mame guide here: