MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Here's an example of the rotate png scanlines...

> Your overlay is pretty good. Like you say, the image stays pretty bright. That's
> because you have a lot of pixels that don't have the RGB pattern on top of them
> lowering the brightness. CRT shaders can keep a bright high contrast look too. It's
> really just a matter of keeping the scanlines bright and sharp, having an aperture
> mask that doesn't lower the brightness too much, and not letting the shader blur the
> pixels too much.
>
> Timothy Lottes had a blog post a few months ago where he talked about a non-realtime
> CRT shader. One of his ideas is how to properly apply tone-mapping in a CRT shader to
> get back the brightness without losing quality in the aperture mask effect. I added a
> quick and dirty tone-mapping step to my local copy of his GLSL CRT shader and it
> looked pretty nice. I never fixed it to do exactly what he described though, but I
> may do that soon and post it here if it looks good. The images are missing from the
> blog post now, but you can read the post here:
> http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2015/09/tonemapping-slot-mask-simulation.html
>
> He had several ideas that wouldn't work with the GLSL system. I don't know which of
> them are feasible in the new BGFX shader system that MooglyGuy has been working on. I
> suppose I can try to make a version of Lottes' shader for the new system once it's in
> the main MAME branch. I guess that would be a good way for me to learn how the new
> system works.

Interesting, hope he'll reload the pics.

In my case it's a really simple job, here on a 3x4 pixels file I just start with set of strong % of RGB px on the bottom line and the rest is filled with vey light %.
Then I adjust everything step-by-step using pure white with a level of alpha transparency to tune every px layer-by-layer until I'm satisfied with the balance.

The problem though here is that it could use an additional very thin line of black(s) in-between the two strong % RGB lines that currently constitute the pseudo-mask line we're seeing.
As it is of course it tends to create dark spots on plain full colors instead of a continuous line.
I'd try something on x5 but MAME is giving me trouble with the integer scale, maybe I'm using the wrong H & V bitmap stretching values, I don't know.

Anyway this is not a convenient method, lots of work to cover enough source resolutions over a single monitor resolution, and it has to be redone with entirely new values and many new sets of overlays for using a monitor with a different res.
I'm not even talking about vertical games over landscape, finding the right spots and colors is very difficult on just a Full-HD panel.
Fingers crossed for great things with BGFX, naturally.

Here another one before I switch to something different;

[ATTACHED IMAGE - CLICK FOR FULL SIZE]

> MAME isn't about playing the games anyway.