Scanlines – fullscreen without border

[ruckage]

Hello,

I wanted to use scanlines but also wanted to display games using the full height of my TV so have created some retroarch overlays to achieve this.
Most other scanline overlays are designed to be used with integer scaling switched on but the downside of this is you either have a black border or lose some of the image.

My overlays are pre-scaled so that they match perfectly with the scaled game image. The downside of this approach is you can’t have a “one-size fits all overlay” as there are several different resolutions that systems use and so you need a different overlay depending on the vertical resolution of the game being played.

To start with I’ve created two overlays suitable for use with systems that have a vertical resolution of 224. This includes CPS1, CPS2, Neogeo, Genesis/Megadrive, Snes and many others.

To use the overlays unzip the archive which I will link to below and copy the directory to the following location: /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/overlays/effects/scanlines

Ensure that retroarch is rendering the display at 1080p. You can set this by pressing ‘x’ after selecting a game.
This will bring up a menu, select:
‘SELECT RETROARCH RENDER RES’
Then: ‘USE VIDEO OUTPUT RESOLUTION’ (assuming that you have your rpi set to 1080p).

Once in Retroarch go to the menu and under settings goto:
‘ONSCREEN OVERLAY’
‘OVERLAY PRESET’
And from here select one of the overlay configs that you copied over. (either ‘scanline-1080p-224.cfg’ or ‘scanline-grille-1080p-224.cfg’)

‘scanline-1080p-224.cfg‘ is just scanlines
‘scanline-grille-1080p-224.cfg‘ is scanlines with an aperture grille effect as well

You can change the opacity of the overlay to your own preference by going to:
‘ONSCREEN OVERLAY’
‘OVERLAY OPACITY’ and adjust the opacity by pushing left or right.

Below are some example screen captures. Be sure to view these at full resolution otherwise they won’t look correct. You can do this in firefox by right clicking the image and selecting ‘VIEW IMAGE’

Closeup image showing the 2 overlays in use at 2x the size and at various opacity levels:

Scanline 100% opacity:

Scanline 75% opacity:

Scanline 50% opacity:

Scanline with aperture grille 100% opacity

Scanline with aperture grille 75% opacity

Scanline with aperture grille 50% opacity

You can download the overlays here: http://bit.ly/1RVy2zJ

Let me know what you think or if you need any help.

[InsecureSpike]

lookin great!
is there anyway these can be converted to be used on 720p tv’s?

[ruckage]

[quote=120044]lookin great!
is there anyway these can be converted to be used on 720p tv’s?

[/quote]
Hi there. I’ve created a 720p scanline for you if you’d like to try it. It won’t look quite as clean as the 1080p as due to the lower resolution the unevenness in the line scaling isn’t so easy to disguise. Having said that, from the mock-ups I made while creating it I don’t think it will look too bad at all (particularly if you lower the opacity a bit). Unfortunately I can’t test it myself as I don’t have any 720p displays.

I haven’t made a version with the aperture grille as I didn’t think that it looked very good as the pixels are too big to make the fine lines needed.

720p scanlines: http://bit.ly/1peDVhI

[InsecureSpike]

oh that’s awesome thank you! I’ll hopefully get to try it over the next few days, thanks so much

[Floob]

Hi ruckage, just let me know if you’d like these to be added to the video manager tool here:
https://github.com/biscuits99/rp-video-manager

[ruckage]

[quote=120080]oh that’s awesome thank you! I’ll hopefully get to try it over the next few days, thanks so much

[/quote]
No problem. Below is a mockup of how they should look (hopefully). The opacity in this mockup is at 65% which looks pretty good in my opinion. (right click and select view image to see full-size)

[quote=120082]Hi ruckage, just let me know if you’d like these to be added to the video manager tool here:
https://github.com/biscuits99/rp-video-manager

[/quote]
Sure, that would be great. I’ll get some made that support other system resolutions as well.

[InsecureSpike]

sadly it’s not letting me unzip the file

[ruckage]

[quote=120125]sadly it’s not letting me unzip the file

[/quote]
That’s odd, I just downloaded again myself to check and the archive is fine and unzips without issues (using both built in windows unzip and 7zip. Have you tried downloading it again as you may have gotten a corrupted download?

[InsecureSpike]

I’ll give it another go, thanks

yup all good, i downloaded thru Firefox this time, before i used Safari

[InsecureSpike]

ok, all good, thank you,
overlay opacity 0.40
overlay scale 1.70

can i add these values to the retroarch.cfg so they load for each game, like a shader?

save the settings via the menu

[ruckage]

[quote=120182]ok, all good, thank you,
overlay opacity 0.40
overlay scale 1.70

can i add these values to the retroarch.cfg so they load for each game, like a shader?

save the settings via the menu

[/quote]
Thanks for trying it out and glad it works. I’m curious though why you’ve changed the overlay scale? That shouldn’t be set to 1.7. if you’re doing that then something is wrong as you’re basically telling it to scale the image to 1.7 time it’s size and as the overlay is exactly 1280×720 it should be set to 1 (no scaling).

Could you get some screenshots of an emulator running with the scanlines so that I can try and see what’s going on? It should be hotkey plus f8 on the keyboard (right shift is hotkey on the keyboard). If you could get one with the overlay scale set at 1 and one with the overlay scale set at 1.7 that would be great. (also set the opacity to 0.6 so I can see it clearly).

The screenshot will be saved in /home/pi/.config/retroarch/screenshots/

Thanks

[InsecureSpike]

i move it up because the lines were not evenly spaced, ill take some screen shots later before work

[ruckage]

[quote=120193]i move it up because the lines were not evenly spaced, ill take some screen shots later before work

[/quote]
Thanks, sounds like there could be an issue somewhere as theoretically it should look exactly the same as the mockup I made. Scaling it up that much should mean that the scanlines don’t line up with the emulated image at all.

Just a thought, make sure that you have your TV set to ‘Just scan’ or the equivalent scaling mode for your TV – otherwise the TV will be displaying a slightly scaled image which would mess up the look of the scanlines (you might have a PC mode on your TV which would do this and turn off all unnecessary processing). Also make sure that all the overscan settings are disabled on the RPI itself.

[InsecureSpike]

ok, these are taken from the master system, Psycho Fox!
screen shot the 1.00 one looks ok here, but off on the tv. could color effect the look the lines? say a shade of blue?
it looks great on other systems, and other master system games

1) 1.00
2) 1.70

http://imgur.com/a/i2fs4

[ruckage]

Thanks for posting those, I see what’s causing the problem problem now. The actual vertial resolution is 768 on those images – I assumed that a 720p display would be 1280 x 720 but I think your TV (and probably many others) actually use a display that is actually 1366 x 768.

Give me a few minutes and I’ll make you another scanline image which designed for a 768 display.

[InsecureSpike]

oh thats, awesome! thank you

[ruckage]

Here you go: http://bit.ly/1QSc2a8

I noticed you were playing Master system. The Master system only has a resolution of 256×192 so needs a different scanline image. I’ve created it for you and it’s in the zip file. – Choose ‘scanline-768p-192.cfg’ and this will match the master system resolution. Master system is a perfect system resolution wise for a 768 display as 768 divides exactly into 192 (768/192=4) so there will be zero distortion with the scanlines.

If you’re playing megadrive or other systems with a screen height of 224 use the “scanline-768p-224.cfg”. This will have slight variation in the scanline height but it will mainly be noticeable on single colour backgrounds (and isn’t too bad even then).

[InsecureSpike]

awesome thanks lots, will test out in the morning

[InsecureSpike]

just out of interest, could overlays be used for the handheld systems?
or even non retroarch systems?

thank you

just found these

[ruckage]

You can certainly use overlays on any libretro system which does include Gameboy, GBA, Gamegear etc. I was toying with the idea of making some overlays that look like the actual handheld for these.

I don’t know if any non libretro systems have overlay support though, apart from maybe the mame emulators..

[InsecureSpike]

great!, thank you for all your help, advice & info,

that would be awesome if you do make retropie based overlays, for handhelds

great work & thank you

[Author]

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