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Scanline filter feature  "Crt style scanline filter."

User is offline   Devon 

#1

Could you add a scanline filer ?

http://scanlines.hazard-city.de/ check the link for more information.

This would make the game look alot more like it did back in the day on a big bulky crt screen.

Almost all emulators have this feature one way or the other.
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User is offline   oasiz 

  • Dr. Effector

#2

Computer monitors ran with 31KHz, image was progressive and didn't do only single flelds like TVs did with old systems as a hack to halve the vertical resolution but to keep it stable 60fps. Only some earlier (around CGA-era stuff) ran in 15KHz modes.
Adding scanlies to VGA-era PC games wouldn't really be accurate as that didn't happen.
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User is offline   m210® 

#3

I don't know for what are you need it, but maybe I can write a shader for my future renderer of it....just for funny effect :P
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User is offline   Tekedon 

#4

No. Waste of time I say... Let Blood look like Blood. CRT monitors weren't blurry messes with scanlines unless you bought a cheap piece of shit. It is what it is. I just want the original Blood.
2

User is offline   Kyanos 

#5

Try https://reshade.me/ I used it with EDuke32 https://forums.duke4...post__p__246444

Posted Image
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User is offline   Devon 

#6

View PostDrek, on 12 July 2017 - 02:51 PM, said:




Im not sure reshade works with bloodgdx yet.


Did the installation but nothing is showing up when i start the game.
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#7

View PostDevon, on 12 July 2017 - 03:08 PM, said:

Im not sure reshade works with bloodgdx yet.

Unless m210 is doing something really wierd, reshade should work with bloodgdx.
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User is offline   Devon 

#8

View Posticecoldduke, on 12 July 2017 - 03:13 PM, said:

Unless m210 is doing something really wierd, reshade should work with bloodgdx.


Its been a while since i used it.

Just ran it and it installed all the shaders into the blood gdx folder.
And then i started the game using the portable java launcher and hit shift+f2 but nothing happens.
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User is offline   Kyanos 

#9

Yeah, I couldn't get reshade working either... I don't know, I didn't try too hard though.
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User is offline   fgsfds 

#10

I feel like you should put reshade's files into the folder with Java's executables, not in the port's folder, but it didn't work either.
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User is offline   Jim 

#11

Maybe it only works with exe files? I can confirm it does work for the AMC TC's eduke32.exe
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User is offline   Devon 

#12

View PostJim, on 12 July 2017 - 09:42 PM, said:

Maybe it only works with exe files? I can confirm it does work for the AMC TC's eduke32.exe


I converted the bat to exe but it still wont recognize it.
Nor will it work with the javalauncher i use.

Also tried the older reshade 2.0+sweetfx version.
And sweetfx 1.5
None of them seem too work.

This post has been edited by Devon: 13 July 2017 - 12:35 AM

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User is offline   Devon 

#13

View PostM210, on 12 July 2017 - 12:14 PM, said:

I don't know for what are you need it, but maybe I can write a shader for my future renderer of it....just for funny effect :P


You dont have too write a shader just for me it is totally fine, you just focus on doing what you do best.. making my favorite fps of all time be even cooler <3

But if reshade could somehow made to work with bloodgdx it would be awsome as they have all kinds of cool shaders.
Also it works with eduke32 so it shouldnt be hard to make it run right?
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User is offline   Hendricks266 

  • Weaponized Autism

  #14

View PostDevon, on 14 July 2017 - 12:47 AM, said:

Also it works with eduke32 so it shouldnt be hard to make it run right?

This is a crucial difference between Java programs and actual exe files.
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User is offline   Devon 

#15

View PostTekedon, on 12 July 2017 - 12:51 PM, said:

No. Waste of time I say... Let Blood look like Blood. CRT monitors weren't blurry messes with scanlines unless you bought a cheap piece of shit. It is what it is. I just want the original Blood.


You sir are uninformed to say the least =)

You have not seen crt monitor blizz until you have gamed on a sony bvm or pvm monitor.

old 2d and even 3d content on a old school high grade crt will outdo any new flatscreen display.

Only thing that comes close in the xrgb mini framemeister upscaler unit but even it cant match the real deal.

I got one sony pvm 20inch monitor in my gaming room along with a xrgb mini on my big screen tv.
Also a bang olufsen mx8000 28inch for some of my other consoles.


Playing blood on a good crt will give you scanlines and it will look crisp and clean and clear as all pixelart does with the right equipment.

Anyway if i could just get reshade to work with GDX im happy enough.
-1

User is offline   oasiz 

  • Dr. Effector

#16

I'd say that you're uninformed in this case, sorry :P

You get those scanlines with 15KHz CRTs, not 31KHz which includes every PC monitor aside from really early ones that couldn't really do VGA to begin with (Of course there are some multisync screens that might natively do 15KHz instead of double scanning).
The scanlines happen because old home computers/consoles put out the image with 240 lines only and TVs have 480 lines that alternate between every field (59.94 times a second/Hz).

Normally you alternate A-B-A-B fields with flicker to get full 480 lines displayed, this is the broadcast standard.
With these systems, they use a hack with the pulsing that tells what field is being drawn and only ends up drawing the A field, you end up with half the vertical resolution but without any flicker and being able to update these 240 lines consistently with 59.94Hz rate.
There are multiple ways to process this, your xrgb mini for example is capable of seeing this "hack" and does a linedouble instead of trying to forcibly de-interlace it as a 480 line picture and constructing a full 30fps motion out of the 240 line content.
Optionally you can toggle scanlines on to mimic the end result on how a TV-CRT would do this "processing" where it's possible to just leave the other field blank due to real time drawing, unlike digital displays that need a full frame.

Even though PCs run 320x200/240 screenmodes, these are different. It's 31Khz and VGA default was 70Hz. 31KHz monitors are capable of displaying full 480 lines on every "field"
You can check these timings from: Here

A PC monitor would NOT display black lines. PVM/BVM and other broadcast monitors display these quite thick since they are pretty good reference monitors and in a broadcasting environment you will want to see what is actually going on and not have the lines bleed to each other too much like cheaper consumer sets do.

Only way to get "scanlines" in old games is that you forcibly changed the signal to be out of spec, modified your program to tell the VGA card to run at a lowered rate and changed H&V sync to be something that a 15KHz monitor can understand (CSync likely).
This would result in out of spec RGBS that you might be able to wire in to a SCART plug wire it to some monitor with BNC, which is a neat trick on it's own but not something anyone really did back then.
Typical GPU S-video output isn't the same here since it does it's own processing in order to stay in spec with broadcast formats.

Bottom line is that Blood was NEVER meant to be played with scanlines, that's an artifact of broadcast formats and regular TVs.
I won't disagree that some games do look better with lines due to brightness balance alone, but in this case that would be retrofitting a PC game to do something it didn't do back then.
Blood is already a very dark, scanlines wouldn't help much unless you artificially added a bunch of brightness/bloom to the image to make things stand out a bit.

What Devon linked is a bit closer to how it should look like, RGB shadow mask being illuminated by a bright beam.
1

User is offline   Hendricks266 

  • Weaponized Autism

  #17

When I was growing up, my elementary school had a few cheap consumer devices where you plug a VGA cable in and get composite (yellow for video, white/red for stereo audio). Maybe somehow that's what OP is familiar with.
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User is offline   oasiz 

  • Dr. Effector

#18

I think that's a DB9 connector that was used for various old home computers as a video output connector.
It can potentially carry RGBI or more commonly TV video signals, yellow in this case is composite video, 15KHz broadcast stuff.
Video format itself can either be 480i or "240p" and NTSC encoded color instead of RGB.
But yes, you'd generally get left scanlines on a TV if using lower resolution modes.

Of course pinouts differ per system.

ANYWAY Sorry for derailing a bit :P
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#19

View PostDevon, on 12 July 2017 - 10:44 AM, said:

Could you add a scanline filer ? ... This would make the game look alot more like it did back in the day on a big bulky crt screen.


Why do people keep saying that? 24 years later I still can't see scanlines on a Progressive mode CRT, not even the fixed frequency, fixed resolution monochrome screens I have. I can run some of them in Interlaced mode, but all this does to the eye is produce flicker at lower refresh rates, you still can't see the lines that much because things just look blurry, though you might be able to catch them out of sync if something darts to the side quickly, like this;
Posted Image
And I doubt you'd want that and you likely wouldn't see it in any games out of the box, they pretty much all ran in Progressive mode except, perhaps, the pre-rendered cutscenes in games like Tomb Raider, in which case you'll still get the effect there anyway, only with slightly worse color and higher power bills on an LCD.

Crap fact: I've actually seen a few old VGA cards which were modified to do "Sync-on-green" for different display types, but they were still running progressive.

Of course I'm not saying that you shouldn't put scanlines there when playing if that's what you want, just be aware that it wasn't how things were intended to be.

This post has been edited by High Treason: 14 July 2017 - 02:26 AM

1

User is offline   oasiz 

  • Dr. Effector

#20

HT: Black lines do appear with TVs due to the way they function, not computer monitors that don't have to adhere to broadcast specs. I guess many mistake that PC games had to have this quirk as well due to using a CRT.
Cinematics in old games add the black lines artificially in order to reduce bandwidth of the video while making it look higher resolution, X-res can be full while Y-res is halved. Funny since broadcast TV does it almost like this in order to save bandwidth as well.
PC monitors generally didn't like interlaced modes.

Anyway... "Scanlines" have nothing to do with CRTs themselves.
More about monitors that are designed to view broadcast format vs. progressive content. Nothing prevents a LCD working the same way but due to the lack of persistent phosphor, it would flicker quite badly (although black lines would show quite well, however this stuff is undesired).
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User is offline   Devon 

#21

View Postoasiz, on 14 July 2017 - 01:39 AM, said:

I'd say that you're uninformed in this case, sorry :P

You get those scanlines with 15KHz CRTs, not 31KHz which includes every PC monitor aside from really early ones that couldn't really do VGA to begin with (Of course there are some multisync screens that might natively do 15KHz instead of double scanning).
The scanlines happen because old home computers/consoles put out the image with 240 lines only and TVs have 480 lines that alternate between every field (59.94 times a second/Hz).

Normally you alternate A-B-A-B fields with flicker to get full 480 lines displayed, this is the broadcast standard.
With these systems, they use a hack with the pulsing that tells what field is being drawn and only ends up drawing the A field, you end up with half the vertical resolution but without any flicker and being able to update these 240 lines consistently with 59.94Hz rate.
There are multiple ways to process this, your xrgb mini for example is capable of seeing this "hack" and does a linedouble instead of trying to forcibly de-interlace it as a 480 line picture and constructing a full 30fps motion out of the 240 line content.
Optionally you can toggle scanlines on to mimic the end result on how a TV-CRT would do this "processing" where it's possible to just leave the other field blank due to real time drawing, unlike digital displays that need a full frame.

Even though PCs run 320x200/240 screenmodes, these are different. It's 31Khz and VGA default was 70Hz. 31KHz monitors are capable of displaying full 480 lines on every "field"
You can check these timings from: Here

A PC monitor would NOT display black lines. PVM/BVM and other broadcast monitors display these quite thick since they are pretty good reference monitors and in a broadcasting environment you will want to see what is actually going on and not have the lines bleed to each other too much like cheaper consumer sets do.

Only way to get "scanlines" in old games is that you forcibly changed the signal to be out of spec, modified your program to tell the VGA card to run at a lowered rate and changed H&V sync to be something that a 15KHz monitor can understand (CSync likely).
This would result in out of spec RGBS that you might be able to wire in to a SCART plug wire it to some monitor with BNC, which is a neat trick on it's own but not something anyone really did back then.
Typical GPU S-video output isn't the same here since it does it's own processing in order to stay in spec with broadcast formats.

Bottom line is that Blood was NEVER meant to be played with scanlines, that's an artifact of broadcast formats and regular TVs.
I won't disagree that some games do look better with lines due to brightness balance alone, but in this case that would be retrofitting a PC game to do something it didn't do back then.
Blood is already a very dark, scanlines wouldn't help much unless you artificially added a bunch of brightness/bloom to the image to make things stand out a bit.

What Devon linked is a bit closer to how it should look like, RGB shadow mask being illuminated by a bright beam.


Everything you just said i agree with.
I totally forgot about alot if not almost all things in my first reply.

One thing though is for certain and that is that the old 31khz vga monitors Had a pattern wich is not present on lcd displays.
I is not like the scanlines every other even or odd line but something else i present.
Some shaders try to replicate the crt effect.

Still Blood could have been ported to the ps1 or maybe even the saturn if the lobotomy devs did it with their slavedriver engine.
Other fps games from the era looks alot better with scanlines applied on my consoles in my opinion cause it adds this virtual sharpness.
Also when it comes to old 2d content the devs developed the games with scanlines in mind because there of the memory limitations.
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User is offline   Striker 

  • Auramancer

#22

If anything, you're looking for a slight curve in the display, and a "Moire" effect, which is something that some CRTs exhibit.
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User is offline   Mblackwell 

  • Evil Overlord

#23

I mean, sometimes you could kinda see a grid/mesh pattern just because of how the whole thing works but that's not scanlines.
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User is offline   leilei 

#24

View Postoasiz, on 12 July 2017 - 12:08 PM, said:

Adding scanlies to VGA-era PC games wouldn't really be accurate as that didn't happen.


TIL the obvious scanlines I've lived through my XGA monitor in most of the 90s is a lie.
Also TIL 1997 is VGA era now, nevermind 3d accel, MMX and true color hi-res advancements etc

This post has been edited by leilei: 14 July 2017 - 08:06 PM

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User is offline   Mblackwell 

  • Evil Overlord

#25

Some XGA monitors ran interlaced.


And VGA monitors were commonly in use through the early 2000's superseded by DVI which was pin compatible. 24bit color and separate GPUs are irrelevant.
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User is offline   leilei 

#26

Whatever is the case whether VGA era referred to the mode or the connector, I haven't used a blurry shadowmask VGA monitor since 1994, well before Blood's time; and doing a proper aperture scanline shader would demand 4k resolutions to get it right without moire. At least in the US, the entirety of VGA monitor history is not solely shadowmask as oasiz implies. It didn't have to be interlaced either.

This post has been edited by leilei: 15 July 2017 - 02:33 PM

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User is offline   Kyanos 

#27

Maybe, just maybe, it may work as an exe, I'll try launch4j and see what happens, won't be for a couple days though probably.
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User is offline   xenoxols 

#28

My dad has this really big old tv which has obvious scanlines. It has a flat screen and looks like a 1x1x1.5 cube. It has S-Video and AV, so I've played my xbox on it. While this is what I think of as retro, it's definitely an outlier.
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User is offline   Devon 

#29

View PostDrek, on 18 July 2017 - 10:59 AM, said:

Maybe, just maybe, it may work as an exe, I'll try launch4j and see what happens, won't be for a couple days though probably.


Intresting.
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User is offline   Kyanos 

#30

So far no luck using launch4j. I'd recommend taking this subject to the libGDX forums, http://www.badlogicgames.com/forum/

Edit: Done. http://www.badlogicg...hp?f=11&t=26682

Quote

Some here may not know that the 90s build engine game Blood has recently been ported to java using libGDX, it's awesome.

Anyways, as per this forum post at duke4.net, https://forums.duke4...187#entry282187

Quote

Could you add a scanline filer ?

http://scanlines.hazard-city.de/ check the link for more information.

This would make the game look alot more like it did back in the day on a big bulky crt screen.

Almost all emulators have this feature one way or the other.



I was wondering if ReShade or some other post-processing is working with libGDX?
If so, please help give pointers on how to do it,
If not please explain why. Is it a java thing? Wrappers within wrappers...


This post has been edited by Drek: 20 July 2017 - 10:31 AM

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