MiSTer FPGA Forum

I wonder if the BGFX effects filter from MAME would be possible on MiSTer? With the shadow masks the realism is higher than before on MiSTer but it can’t compete with BGFX.

Especially with the crt-geom-deluxe filter the video screen looks like a real CRT, maily because each pixel is converted, not only a shadow mask as overlay.

It looks so real that I can not believe it.

My uneducated guess is that this is most likely not possible. BGFX uses shaders, so to achieve the same on the Mister, you will somehow have to implement and execute these. The problem with MiSTer is that it does not really have the hardware for that. The ARM CPU can't efficiently calculate shaders so we can eliminate that one as an option. The only remaining possibility is to compute the shaders on the FPGA. This will ALSO most probably not happen, since there is a lot of other important stuff that, one, can only be done on the FPGA, and (2) has more priority, such as driving the SNES core. There is not enough space on the FPGA to also compute shaders. Unfortunately, and very much so.

Not to mention that someone would have to program shader calculation on the FPGA, which probaably is pretty difficult as well.

Anyway, you should most likely disregard this comment because I know barely anything about how this hardware can function.

It would probably require another device to take the video from MiSTer (via Direct Video) and doing the scaling and shader effects itself before sending the video on to the display. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

The closest thing to the ultra realistic MAME bgfx crt-geom-deluxe on MiSTer is the mask Simple(Monochrome)/RetroTink/AG-Coarse.

But the dots in the masks do not represent a dot in the game. Unfortunately.

clarkkent wrote: ↑Sun Feb 06, 2022 10:29 am The closest thing to the ultra realistic MAME bgfx crt-geom-deluxe on MiSTer is the mask Simple(Monochrome)/RetroTink/AG-Coarse.

But the dots in the masks do not represent a dot in the game. Unfortunately.

When is that actually desirable? Real CRT masks almost never align with game pixels. Misalignment is part of the look!

Nevertheless I think the crt-geom-deluxe bgfx should be the threshold.