slangp file you have downloaded it should be immediately visible. Select Shaders and make sure they’re enabled, then select Load and find the. Next, start a game of your choice and bring up RetroArch’s quick menu via F1 or a dedicated button on your controller. If you had to switch the video mode (away from gl), you should restart RetroArch now. Afterwards, enable bilinear filtering in Settings → Video towards the bottom. The default of gl is an older version of OpenGL that does not support the Slang shader language. Make sure Video in this submenu is set to one of vulkan, glcore, d3d11 or d3d12. Next, fire up RetroArch and navigate to Settings → Video → Output. There should be a shaders_slang folder inside that directory already, just put the. Grab my shader preset from this link and save the file inside your RetroArch/shaders directory. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, with and without my shader preset. Let’s take a quick look at how much this already improves the visuals in, say, TLoZ: A Link to the Past: Most importantly, a shader that emulates NTSC. The existing ones actually include everything we need. I am a programmer, but shaders are just something I haven’t even dipped my toes into yet. RetroArch comes with a few existing shaders and presets already, which is super lucky for me, because I have no clue how to write shaders. Since RetroArch also supports shaders, we can use those to make things look a little more retro. Now that this is out of the way, the promised juicy bits. You have one central user interface that you then use to fire up an emulator (or core as they’re called in RetroArch) of your choice, and then a game, probably. ![]() In case you do not yet know what RetroArch is: it’s a frontend for multiple video game system emulators. Let’s get to the juicy bits! Using shaders in RetroArch to emulate a CRT But I think we can all agree that this has been enough boring introduction. It would seem that the game developers (and especially artists) from those days specifically abused the quirks of NTSC to achieve some specific visual effects. With NTSC being used in both the United States and Japan, it should be no surprise that many games from the SNES era seem to be “tuned” to NTSC’s visual artifacts. NTSC was one of the three big standards used around the globe to encode analogue television data. ![]() The important part is that with those analogue signals, the data going across had to be compressed, losing some information of the image in the process. This is a whole different topic, and a large one at that. TV signals back then were analogue, as opposed to digital. I reckon some higher end devices could get pretty sharp as well, but my family did not have any of those :) The CRTs alone were not the only ingredient to this funky recipe, of course. In contrast to LCDs, where pixels are all (usually) quite crisp, consumer CRT monitors or televisions from the 90s all had a certain blur to it. Back when consoles like the SNES were popular, however, this technology wasn’t readily available to consumers. Nowadays we have liquid crystal displays (or even OLED) in pretty much every device that features a display. ![]() While emulating the SNES hasn’t been an issue for a long time now, I think one core aspect of the experience is often forgotten: emulating the look and feel you would get from playing these games on a CRT. I regularly come back to some old classics to play them again, like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Terranigma, Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country. My favorite console from “that time” is the SNES. Pixel art is cool, and so are retro games. ![]() Want to skip straight to the download and instructions? This way, please! « Home Emulating CRT visuals in RetroArch
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