What games are you playing this week? 2017-02-20

[Darksavior]

@obsidianspider too bad retropie doesn't have the PC shaders :(. I would love to start on some gb games on the pi but i'm so spoiled to what it looks like on pc

[pjft]

@Darksavior Oh, wow.

What's that shader's name? Any reason why it can't be used on/copied over to RetroPie?

[Darksavior]

@pjft https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders/blob/master/handheld/gb-pocket-shader.cgp
There's also a green version.
I made a thread a while back about it. One guy tried to get it working but it was so slow and nowhere near as good. I'm rather new to shaders so I don't know why it's not on retropie.

[obsidianspider]

@Darksavior That's a really nice looking shader. It normally just run without any shaders, but for something dot matrix like a Gameboy I would really like that.

[pjft]

Got it, thanks.

I see, it is quite taxing on the CPU.

I'll see if there's anything I could do with overlays and shaders as well, but @edmaul69 seems to have done quite a bit of work already with little success, so I'm not going to hold my hopes up.

I love this grey one, though, more than the green one. It's wonderful.

[Capeman]

I spent a half hour or so blasting interstellar bolsheviks last night!

[pjft]

@Darksavior I see there are quite a few palettes in the folder.

Are you using the stock gp-pocket-shader configuration, no customization for that particular set up with the grey look?

Just so I can take a proper look at it, and worst case scenario see if coming up with a lite version of it would be possible.

EDIT: Nevermind, I see it's the stock one, using paper-bg and gbp-palette. Thanks. Will report back.

[edmaul69]

@pjft if you can figure out a lite version that would be awesome. I would love being able to use this shader.

[hooperre]

@Capeman said in What games are you playing this week? 2017-02-20:

I spent a half hour or so blasting interstellar bolsheviks last night!

Holy. Santa clause. Shit. Yes.

[pjft]

@Darksavior @obsidianspider @edmaul69

Ok, so I took a stab at that. Long-story short: it's not going to happen in its current format, but I managed to come up with a workaround that isn't great, but it's serviceable, at least for me.

Maybe you can help me improve it slightly. I wonder if I should start a new thread, though, but I'll post it here as you were following here.

What does this consist of:

• Custom palette in lr-gambatte
• overlay grid for RetroArch

I retrieved the colors from the screenshot @Darksavior sent me, which are much nicer than either the green or the grayscale defaults there, and created a custom palette. For you to instal it, you should:

1. Log in via SSH

2. Navigate to ~/RetroPie/BIOS/palettes

   cd ~/RetroPie/BIOS/palettes

3. Backup your default palette

   sudo cp default.pal default.pal.bak

4. Open the default.pal file in a text editor

   sudo nano defaul.pal

5. Edit the default.pal file with this content:

   [General]
   Background0=9278577
   Background1=5067329
   Background2=2567206
   Background3=1119765
   Sprite%2010=9278577
   Sprite%2011=5067329
   Sprite%2012=2567206
   Sprite%2013=1119765
   Sprite%2020=9278577
   Sprite%2021=5067329
   Sprite%2022=2567206
   Sprite%2023=1119765

6. Load up a Gameboy game using lr-gambatte

7. Open the Retroarch Menu (select + triangle/X on the Xbox controller)

8. Quick Menu > Options

9. There should be something about palette or colorization. Make sure it's set to "custom". It might be "internal" or "auto".

10. You may want to Save Core Overrides, so the change sticks. See if you like them, first.

11. If you return to the game, the colors should now be closer to the screen @Darksavior shared.

Now, for the overlay for the grid.

1. Download the overlay here.
2. Copy the file to a folder in your Raspberry Pi, and extract the contents to /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/overlays/
3. In the RetroArch menu, choose Settings > On-Screen Display (or something similar?) > Overlay (or similar) and then navigate to the overlays folder and select gb-overlay-0-100.cfg or gb-overlay-20-100.cfg
4. Set transparency to no more than 0.24 for the 0-100 variant. Try to play with the 20-100 one with different values if you feel like it - haven't tried yet.
5. Go to the Settings > Video Menu, and make sure Integer Scale is ON
6. Go back to the game.

My main problem, at least with the 0-100 one I was using earlier, was that there was a slight color bleeding from the grid to the background, even though it's exactly the same color (or maybe precisely because it's the exact same color?), which makes it rather crappy-looking. 24% transparency seems to alleviate that while making it reasonably grid-like. Maybe the ones I've shared don't have the color bleeding problem - I didn't compress the images, in hopes that that was the cause, and the 20-100 one has a slight coloring in the transparent squares just so it isn't fully transparent, in case that was also what was causing it.

It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's serviceable. See how it works out for you. I haven't fully tried these ones I'm sharing as I don't have access to my Pi at the moment - I just created new versions of the images, and the 20-100 variant.

Hope it helps anyone, and I'm open to suggestions on fixing the color bleeding. Maybe trying out a slightly different background color in the custom palette would help.

Let me know how it goes.

[dankcushions]

@pjft not sure if it's related but i noticed that the 0-100.png (didn't check the other one) had some slight colour variances between the grid pixels. shouldn't it all be the same RGB number?

retroarch has the ability to set the alpha of the overlay but if i remember right it looks like you have it set to 1.0 (fully opaque) in the .cfg, so i dunno why there would be a bleed. weird!

[pjft]

@dankcushions Those artifacts might definitely be there, and that may be what's causing the bleed. I do agree it's likely to be on the image side of things, until proven otherwise.

Sadly, on my Mac I only have Gimp, and God knows I am useless with it.

I have fixed those color variances now and uploaded a new zip.

It might just be an artifact from my TV as well, so would love to hear others' experiences.

EDIT: updated the zip and URL, adding two more overlays for testing: gb-overlay-0-50 and gb-overlay-0-30 . These are intended to be set to 100% opacity in RetroArch, as I've applied the transparency on the actual png file, seeing if it helps. Let me know your experiences with them. I'll test them out maybe later today or tomorrow.

EDIT 2: created a grid at a slightly higher resolution, in case it's caused by some stretching and aliasing on the rendering front. The new ones have 960x864 resolution, which should match a 1080p screen with Integer Scaling ON. I included 1px grids and 2px grids, as well as 30%, 50% and 100% opacity variants so hopefully one of all of these images should produce reasonable results that would allow us to then start fine-tuning things.

[Capeman]

@pjft said in What games are you playing this week? 2017-02-20:

Sadly, on my Mac I only have Gimp, and God knows I am useless with it.

If you need a good design program for Mac, but don't want to pay out the butt for Photoshop, i recommend Pixelmator or Affinity Photo. Much easier to use than GIMP

[pjft]

Thanks @Capeman for the tips. These seem to be quite professional-looking tools - I'll certainly keep them on my shortlist for the future.

At the moment, though, anything you'd recommend for pixel-based tasks like Paint.Net, but on a Mac? A Mac is not my long-term platform of choice (the only laptop I have at the moment is my work laptop, hence the Mac requests), so I'm not at the moment looking to invest in paid software for a platform that is quite transient for me, in nature.

Thanks!

[Capeman]

@pjft Not sure on that one, I'm a professional designer by day so I rarely need to dabble in free/opensource graphics software. But pixelmator's entry cost of $30 for a lifetime license is a pretty sweet deal. Affinity is definitely more power packed at $50 lifetime, neither break the bank to much and both compete with photoshop on almost every level.

OR you could always just get one month of Adobe photoshop photographers edition for $10 and cancel it before it renews. (adobe suite is monthly).

[pjft]

Of course - I wasn't looking for cheating the system! Just looking for any software that may be best suited for simple pixel work, including layers, but nothing overly complex :)

I'll look into pixelmator - it looks amazing, but being Mac only means I am tied to my work laptop, as I doubt I'll buy a Mac for personal use, so I'm hesitant.

Thanks for the tips, though - it's always good to know what professionals actually use to get their work done, so that I can consider looking into the same or similar tools :)

[pjft]

Ok, so final derailing. Using the 0-100-960-2x overlay seems to work quite well on a 1080p screen as there's no scaling. I suspect that's what was causing the color bleeding artifacts but I have no evidence other than it seems gone.

I couldn't get the emulator to store the custom color palette preferences, need to check if it was a one off.

Hope this helps. It's not as elegant as the shader, but as it is I'd probably rate it a 7/10. With some more fine tuning maybe I can get it to be an 8/10. :)

I saw a slightly different screenshot with slightly different colors somewhere else. Will see if using that palette changes things for the better.

Let me know your thoughts and how it goes for you.

Answer to the topic subject: most of last week and this week I've been tinkering. Unfortunately haven't played much.

[pjft]

@dankcushions Ok, so it still doesn't solve my artifacts, so I'm kind of stumped.

This is how it looks like.

You'll see, it doesn't look quite bad on darker pixels, but on the same colored pixels it's quite ugly.

Maybe the solution is to do it at a different color altogether? Any ideas?

[dankcushions]

@pjft said in What games are you playing this week? 2017-02-20:

@dankcushions Ok, so it still doesn't solve my artifacts, so I'm kind of stumped.

This is how it looks like.

You'll see, it doesn't look quite bad on darker pixels, but on the same colored pixels it's quite ugly.

Maybe the solution is to do it at a different color altogether? Any ideas?

not sure :( might be worth asking on the libretro forums as they talk about this sort of thing a lot. i think it might be some sort of problem with alpha but who knows.

[pjft]

Not a bother - just checking. It might be my TV.

I'll try a different color.

Enough derailing on what we're playing this week, though. :) Thanks!