samsonlonghair wrote:I'm not really familiar with CRT plugins. Do they work well? Is the difference noticeable? What should I look for?
If you're using Retroarch, shader plugin support takes emulation to another level. It's the next best thing to a PVM, and I'd go so far as to say it makes the expense of an XRGB unnecessary.
Start at the Filthypants blog for more info on what shaders you think would work for you, and then go to the libretro github and grab the shaders you like, or all of them and test each out on your display, which I recommend.
link:
https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders (download as zip and unpack in the RA shader directory)
To emulate CRT, I recommend three cases (I use 1.2.2 so this information may have changed slightly since that release):
CRT-RoyaleThis is the king of accessible CRT emulation as far as I'm concerned. The default settings look pretty bad, and if you asked me before looking into it, I wouldn't have even guessed it was a CRT shader. Once you tweak it though, it delivers the most pleasing scanline emulation, with a tweakable TVL spec, glow and halation, color bleed, mask type, and geometry. I looked into a thread over at Shmups and used the settings by a user there named Kurozumi as a basis for my experimentation, I eventually tweaked a few things to emulate a BVM.
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=51298&p=1135007&hilit=shader+thread#p1135007 thread over at Shmups
The settings I used are quoted in that latest post, and is a great start. If you're interested in what I changed and what I found through experimentation after that, let me know.
The downside to Royale is that it uses 12 passes of shaders to achieve its power and versatility. There is a lighter version as well, but it is still a very heavy multi-pass shader and crippled an old Dual-Core 2 Lakka box when used with Bsnes. Use with caution, or just use...
CRT-Geom/HylianThese two shaders are both very good for simple scanline emulation, with a few strong features. They're much lighter than Royale, and will get you 90% there if you're looking for the crisp PVM look. The scanlines aren't quite as defined and the options are slim, but I wouldn't hesitate to use either if I couldn't use Royale. I can't recommend one over the other since they have different strengths. Geom, as the name implies, gives you geometry control so you can go for the "bubble" or "barrel" look of old tubes, and Hylian is the lightest quality CRT shader in two ways; it displays the least added lag in tests by Filthypants, and it integrates a glow and halation control which is a big part of emulating the phosphorescence of CRTs.
The only issue I've ever had is with a flickering effect with the more standard CRT shaders, especially evident on the PS1 boot screen in Mednafen, in which case I use...
LottesThe Lottes CRT shader is a big name in the small pond of CRT emulation. It was originally made for use in MAME, and that's where I first ran into it. I don't like it very much in comparison to the shaders I listed above; it looks a little basic and less polished than the others, with a very prominent "overlay" feel. It gives basic control over geometry, and attempts to emulate an arcade-style shadow mask. The upside to this presentation is that the flicker effect isn't an issue here, and tstill looks good enough to recommend, at least for MAME and Mednafen if the others give you trouble.
I hope this helps! Oh, and for any of these, make sure you use Integer scaling if you can. On a 1080p set it chops off some of the top and bottom of the image, but without it, you'll get uneven scanlines on 240p and 288p scaling. I don't think this is as much of an issue on 1200p or on 4k screens.
