Links and Guides to Custom Shaders for Pete's OpenGL2 plugin

[ViperXtreme]

tested it, it gives a dark image most of the time specially in the max level, not good in some games since you can barely see anything, but looks nice for others (imo), tested it on my GeForce 6600GT 128MB, forceware 93.71 i think.

[inforce]

wow i am in for it.. i just downloaded all these shaders and can't wait to try them out! Makes me wanna FF7 again LoL

[SimoneT]

New GLSL toon shader from ShadX:

http://forums.ngemu.com/attachment.p...1&d=1169124928

Ciao.

[SimoneT]

Very good series. You must try it.
Ciao.

[aolforbroadband]

Oh yeah, just following up, I finally got it to unzip. Silly 7-Zip was the problem.

Anyway, it looks great and really makes the color more vivid and it looks great since I have this monitor: http://www.nordichardware.se/skrivel.../357/Front.jpg and it really makes everything stand out.

Great work.

[chancet]

thanks guys for your hard work programming this stuff. i'm gonna finally play through final fantasy IX now with one of these shaders like I've wanted to for quite some time.

question i've had for a while: can you write an algorithm to increase the colour depth for sprites on 16 or 8 bit? I thought it would be a simple matter of blending the two nearest pixels together and getting a new colour as a result when the resolution is heightened? isn't it that simple? just wondering why i've seen all manners of plugins for graphics smoothing and what not for the super nintendo but no colour depth increasing plugins...

[SimoneT]

Originally Posted by chancet

question i've had for a while: can you write an algorithm to increase the colour depth for sprites on 16 or 8 bit? I thought it would be a simple matter of blending the two nearest pixels together and getting a new colour as a result when the resolution is heightened? isn't it that simple? just wondering why i've seen all manners of plugins for graphics smoothing and what not for the super nintendo but no colour depth increasing plugins...

All shaders runs without know the color depth. Color is a vector with four components (RGBA), every component is in 0.0 to 1.0 range. For example, if the depth is 16bit(R5G5B5A1) the steps from 0.0 to 1.0 are equals to 1.0/31.0 for R, G and B, and for 32bit (R8G8B8A8) are equals to 1.0/255.0. You can decrease the number of steps (from 1.0/255.0 to 1.0/31.0, AKA dithering) but you can't increase the number of the steps (from 1.0/31.0 to 1.0/255.0) without some interpolation. In other words: you can decrease color depth but you cannot increase it.
I hope that my Engrish (for Hushypushy) is comprehensible.
Ciao.

[darth sephiroth]

Originally Posted by SimoneT

New GLSL toon shader from ShadX:

http://forums.ngemu.com/attachment.p...1&d=1169124928

Ciao.

alright, i like this one. Here's some pictures of it in use! you'll just have to exuse the resolution in picture 2, ogl2 + my comp hates the ff8 victory dance

[Trotterwatch]

Just got a GL 2.0 capable card today, only an X700 but wow I'm so impressed by these shaders. Just had a blast playing some games on EPSXE with a 'toon shader'.

Sony should have tried to implement something like this themselves on the PS3

[chancet]

Originally Posted by SimoneT

All shaders runs without know the color depth. Color is a vector with four components (RGBA), every component is in 0.0 to 1.0 range. For example, if the depth is 16bit(R5G5B5A1) the steps from 0.0 to 1.0 are equals to 1.0/31.0 for R, G and B, and for 32bit (R8G8B8A8) are equals to 1.0/255.0. You can decrease the number of steps (from 1.0/255.0 to 1.0/31.0, AKA dithering) but you can't increase the number of the steps (from 1.0/31.0 to 1.0/255.0) without some interpolation. In other words: you can decrease color depth but you cannot increase it.
I hope that my Engrish (for Hushypushy) is comprehensible.
Ciao.

thanks. luckily i'm a programmer but am not too up to snuff with color implementation. a shader couldn't do it but i suppose them dudes that do the other type of plugins have it in their area. i'll bother them about it.

[inforce]

anyone have clearer ff8 screenshots? i wanna see it with some custom shaders soo bad but those shots up there were fuzzy

[guest.r]

It's tricky with colors.
Originally the PSX games can't do much better as 16bit. The games look better with 32bit textures due the increased range for each of the colorspace component (RGB and alpha). 32bit rendering mode also shows significant better quality when texture filtering is turned on. But, if you choose to ignore filtering, you look at pretty much same colors that the original PSX would send to the TV screen.

Further the image quality that the 8 and 16 bit sprites produce can be improoved. We mentioned filtering. Textures can be improoved (like with the popular method of mr. Rice). Fullscreen filters applied. With smart algorithms a good "like 32bit originating look" can be achieved. But details can't be added. Only emulated, like with the toon shader.

[SimoneT]

I have written this shader for enhance FFVII display.
Read the "HQFFVII.txt" inside.
Here some comparison screenshots.
1, 3 and 5 shader in action.
2, 4 and 6 no shader.
Ciao.
New WIP version added. It contain also a GLSL version tested only on ATI. If some user could report me possible bugs...

[inforce]

not bad. Thats a good one. I might be trying that out today!

[chancet]

so are there any plugins that will make 16-bit sprites 32-bit? i haven't seen any filters for super nintendo emulators that do that. it seems a simple algorithm.

and what about polygon doubling code? to make circles rounder and such. i guess it would work with circles, but for every object made with polygons, the code would have to have some way of knowing where to insert the new polygon (for instance. not always taking the x y coordinates of existing polygons and finding the median. maybe the code would have to observe several polygons at a time and decide whether the object is trying to be round. some objects wouldn't want to be more rounded but remain flat, like the length of a sword, for instance. perhaps the pros have already thought about these things and not enough information is given by the game to know where to insert extra polygons.). Anyway, that would be cool it they could do it, and probably one of the biggest steps to making psx games appear newer.

Oh, and I was wondering if HDR is possible.

And...
are there any psx emulators that can handle more than one shader plugin at a time?

[guest.r]

There was an older thread on pbertert's where this was discussed. I can imagine this geometry modification made sooner on the 1.st gen HW plugins and later on the OGL2. The general coding approach can be a hurdle as it turned out to be one regarding the OGL2 multipass.
Next thing, if the "geometry smoothing" is turned on, the results may not be as correct as expected. The GTE engine does some pre-rendering calculations and the gpu must handle an altered set of geometry data.
Ati guys tried it with Truform(tm), which turned to be an early turn in the wrong direction.
1. a game must have support for Truform(tm).
2. Truform(tm) conflicted with advanced rendering thingies as shaders, shading...

Maybe Truform(tm) or a nVidia alternative will emerge/resurrect and the PSX emu advancement show will continue.

Bout HDR. It's all about very bright light sources related with angles of exposure.
But - PSX emu uses offscreen buffers and full precision rendering calculations. One may sleep better now.

[chancet]

gee thanks for answering all my questions. i will read wikipedia on that truform... sounds interesting

[guest.r]

Originally Posted by chancet

gee thanks for answering all my questions. i will read wikipedia on that truform... sounds interesting

It seems you already did.

[darth sephiroth]

the storybook shader is showing up like this for me...
btw i love your bump map shader simoneT

[SimoneT]

Originally Posted by darth sephiroth

the storybook shader is showing up like this for me...
btw i love your bump map shader simoneT

There are many incompatibilities between Ati and Nvidia GLSL parsers. Ati parser is based on 3Dlabs parser and Nvidia is based on CG parser. For that I prefer to write my shaders in ARB, the two compilers are nearly the same. I will try to convert this shader to ARB.
Ciao.