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Posted by
2020-05-13
CRT Shader Hack
A post on the forum made me curious about CRT shaders.
There are ways to hack a CRT shader into Steem SSE, for example using the SweetFX utility available at www.Guru3D.com.
A fake d3d9.dll intercepts calls to the real one. The effects are cumulative and highly customisable.
It already works with current D3D releases of Steem as it is. Guess nobody knew!
Just what you've all been waiting for:
This was produced with settings I like, it's certainly possible to do better, and the good news is that you the player can do that, choosing your effects and your settings.
I reckon it would mean a lot of code to reproduce all this natively, and it likely wouldn't be as flexible. Integration of this as a plugin is far less involved and it will be a feature of Steem 4.1. This means it is already in the current beta!
On startup, Steem looks for the (renamed) dll in its plugins folders.
There is a new CRT Emu option on the ST Video page.
It uses SweetFX v1.4, because the advanced CRT shader of v1.5 will crash on my settings. It's not very important which versions we use, SweetFX has been discontinued anyway.
More about SweetFX
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/sweetfx-shader-suite-release-and-discussion-thread-4.381912/
(you don't need to download it there, an adapted version is in the beta)
Lately I realised that another utility works with Steem like with other programs.
ShaderGlass. There are lots of effects to check, including RetroArch shaders.
https://github.com/rohatsu/ShaderGlass
I checked some and I'm still rather "meh" about it all to be honest. A matter of taste no doubt.
The problem with that tool is that it uses the full client area of a window. So the toolbar is now optional just like the status bar. It could be useful for other tools as well, or just for a more immersive experience. I like it so. Also, there's a pixel multiplier setting in ShaderGlass, by setting it to 1 the picture gets less trashy.
Here in action, without then with.