MAME Shader Roundup - GLSL Configuration Working Again! Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everybody!

With a very big MAME 0.227 release, I took some time to sum up the options that Mac Users have in terms of shaders - please read at least this post first for an overview, and I follow up on that one.

Out of the box: When you run MAME without any tweaks, it only smoothens the pixels, but does not apply any shaders. By this, every operating system starts MAME games, while shaders are often very OS-centric.

When to use this: Only if you have a system that does not cope with any of the below options nicely.

GLSL is back again! For quite some time I thought that the good old OpenGL shaders no longer work, but they actually do. Let me summarise how to configure two variants of the CRT-GEOM shader for MAME GLSL.

New download repository: https://sites.google.com/site/o0kinghanco0o/crt-geom-alternative-downloads

A nice overview of CRT-GEOM: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/CRT_Geom

Variant 1: CRT-geom-20120130.zip is a one-pass shader without halation, it provides for the 'original' CRT-GEOM look. In vertical games, it switches automatically to a vertical view, so there is no need for different vertical configurations. I believe that this compares to CRT-GEOM (somewhat) in BGFX.

CRT-GEOM GLSL - picture 1 (click to enlarge)

 

CRT-GEOM GLSL - picture 2 (click to enlarge)

Variant 2: CGWG-CRT-geom-halation-20151123.zip is a further development that includes 'halation'. I believe that this compares to CRT-GEOM DELUXE (somewhat) in BGFX. It provides for three passes. I personally prefer turning halation off, which I will explain in the configuration section.

CRT-GEOM Halation - picture one, halation effect minimised (click to enlarge)

CRT-GEOM Halation - picture 2, halation effect minimised (click to enlarge)

When to use GLSL: On some machines with weak GPUs, GLSL still performs better than BGFX. Interestingly, BGFX is already ahead of GLSL on my iMac Late 2013, while my Mac mini runs GLSL far better than any BGFX variant. So GLSL seems to be still a valid fall-back in case of performance issues in BGFX.

BGFX - CRT GEOM: This has been my standard shader for quite some time now. I personally prefer it over CRT-GEOM Deluxe because the 'bloom' effect causes serious white streaks on black background, which I find disadvantageous. Just a matter of taste.

BGFX - CRT-GEOM, picture 1 (click to enlarge)

BGFX - CRT-GEOM, picture 2 (click to enlarge)

When to use BGFX: If your machine can cope with it, you should use it. It's the new standard in MAME and the best quality on Macs. CRT-GEOM performs better than HLSL.

Configuration of BGFX: Please revert to this post - Step 4.

Configuration of GLSL: Follows soon in this post!