Filter or shader for SORR v5.2 in widescreen mode YES! OH MY GOD YES! and tha's de way:

:

Below, the miracle prints:






















Old players love 'pure pixel art'? It may even be that BUT I am an old player and I am not playing 'minecraft' or emulating a 16-bit cartridge on a pentinum3 in 1999! So if you ask me if I prefer "pure pixel art" or "rounded pixels" for a filter or shader of any kind .... I will tell you that I want to see an image in high definition!

IMPORTANT: If you do not use the "Windowns10" operating system, I cannot say that your computer will have this effect of rounding pixels in the zoom! You have to test it!

Old players love 'pure pixel art'? It may even be that BUT I am an old player and I am not playing 'minecraft' or emulating a 16-bit cartridge on a pentinum3 in 1999! So if you ask me if I prefer "pure pixel art" or "rounded pixels" for a filter or shader of any kind .... I will tell you that I want to see an image in high definition!

And believe me, after 10 years playing streets of rage remake, JUST NOW the image is OF MY TASTE!

The magic happened to me under the following conditions:
- Windows 10 zoom
- SorR standard window in widescreen mode (4x3 should be the same but not tested), not in 2x or 3x .... just normal!

- Adjusting the zoom will generate minor imperfections on the screen but nothing will affect the game.

- The ideal zoom percentage may be different and may not fill 100% of your screen. And you can use a dark wallpaper so that the sides or horizontals don't bother you!





My configs:






I created this topic to share this 'discovery' with everyone after all!

Many like me broke their heads trying to find a solution to improve the graphics experience in this beloved game!



In my personal opinion, the game should present only one type of graphic image: wine!

Hope this helps!

This looks awful. You've taken crisp pixel artwork that was originally designed to look good on a CRT and turned it into a blurry mess where small details like eyes are completely obliterated and lost. Just look at Blaze and Adam's faces. Instead of low-resolution, painstakingly shaded pixel art, it now looks like a weirdly stylized high-res where someone decided to draw everything with abstract geometric shapes and blobs. Just look at what's happened to the stuff that's supposed to be square or rectangular, such as the windows of the buildings on the title screen.

Furthermore, this appears to introduce a bunch of really ugly looking vertical artifacts everywhere: https://imgur.com/a/NTmog2I

I do like the water vs wine comparison, if only because it's an unintentionally and appropriately dire warning against alcoholism. Water is what's good for your body and soul.

After so many years I can't really put a game on my high definition TV in 'pure pixel art' where it applies about 8x the original resolution completely distorting the original expectation of inance in the mega drive! I prefer a cartoonized filter to soften the giant lego blocks that such an enlargement of image 416-320x240 to 1920x1080 creates!
Just place the game in 1x window to see what the original perspective is, without so many squares on the screen!

Anyway I am glad to know that we have many options of visual perspective for this beloved game, my dear 'water man' since the game did not give us such options natively in its new 'widescreen' format. In fact if you know how to apply CRT scanline or any other type of filter to the widescreen mode in the game I am all ears! You are my favorite Roo player! Health!

I do not normally use shaders or CRT filters because I don't mind the look of lower res games on large displays where the pixels are crisp and visible, but what you're after is something that can be configured to work system-wide with any game. I think this is what you're after: https://reshade.me

example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwQUBsxK6JA

Yes I have used shaders via reshade for many years and in many steam games the result is excellent! But speaking in terms of "SorR" the game is unconventional and does not use OpenGL or DirectX of any kind which makes it impossible for us to apply reshade or "SweetFIX" to improve the image of SOR = /  



I understand the reasons why you thought "windos10 zoom" was a bad idea .... but think of it as using a "mod" in a steam game, it's something that only you will see! It won't bother other players, so that's okay, right? I mean, it's a discovery that I made and wanted to share here on the forum.

Maybe somebody else will like it someday =]

I'll never be able to understand people who prefer THIS over the sharp-looking pixel art. This is just distasteful.

Ahh, this is the style I know as "SuperEagle" on Snes9X. Used it a lot back when I first played emulators.
It was kind of interesting seeing retro graphics smoothed out, but I also prefer crisp pixels these days.

Good God, that looks like an Atrocity! CRT Filters(HLSL/Hylian/Scanlines) are the only acceptable Retro filters. Everything else just makes the game look WORSE.

Just tried this. Wow, what an improvement!    I've been trying years to get reshade to work with SORR. This is the equivalent of an xbrz filter, best used for cartoony visuals.
Does it only happen while the game is in windowed mode though? I guess I can use Nvidia to stretch out the image as a workaround.
Thank you so much for this - until we can get reshade to work with SORR, this is a great fix!

The only way I was able to apply shaders to this game was using a desktop app called ShaderGlass.

It has a huge library of shaders, it works in fullscreen but there are some downsides to using it:
- It's heavy on the system, although a current-gen rig should handle it without hiccups.
- In fullscreen it gets a yellow border around the screen (Windows actually does that), it can be worked around best in Windows 11, in Windows 10 you'd need a second monitor to project the screen and then bring it back to the original monitor and that way it'll lose that border.

Here's a couple screenshots using shaders:

Interesting programme, ill probably download the re-shader and see what difference it makes on the game. my pc can handle it, I think.

I have also found some more desktop app filter alternatives that will work with SORR, as long as you know how to use them.

REminiCRT
Magpie
Scout APM
The-Forge
goverlay
DirectXTK12
ares
GOESP
common-shaders

And many more. I will leave some screen shots of which ones are the best to use. I will also get around to posting links to all of these eventually. Some of these work for 3D games aswell.

New Found Overlay: CRT-Geom-Interlaced

Axle Stone 1991 wrote:I have also found some more desktop app filter alternatives that will work with SORR, as long as you know how to use them.

REminiCRT
Magpie
Scout APM
The-Forge
goverlay
DirectXTK12
ares
GOESP
common-shaders

And many more. I will leave some screen shots of which ones are the best to use. I will also get around to posting links to all of these eventually. Some of these work for 3D games aswell.

New Found Overlay: CRT-Geom-Interlaced

Oh, you think that's great? That's nothing. I found a real sweet spot using reshade me, custom filters for it, another program called omniscaler and just the right combination of bezels with scanlines. I've perfected IMAO an upscaled look that gives the game a freshcoat of paint.

If you're interested I could upload my version of SORR here so you could play around with it, etc.

I agree with your sentiment above, and it was a project of mine for a couple of years to figure this out. What I did is on par with retroarch and 6bzx, etc.

https://ibb.co/Bfy2dNS

that looks exactly like the sort of crt filter someone would make if they'd never played anything on a crt screen before

bareknuckleroo wrote:that looks exactly like the sort of crt filter someone would make if they'd never played anything on a crt screen before

Nice trolling there.

I actually owned an amiga monitor back in the day and was one of the first people to use a custom RGB cable for SOR2, like as far back as the 90s.

Some of us are not going for a CRT-look, for that I'd use a real CRT monitor. I know that simulating it as exact as possible is a thing for some people but for me it is the actually physical screen itself that makes that work and any simulation will always fall just short enough to be unsatisfying.

Plus, some of us like to upscale the graphics too, and give these older games a nice HD fresh-coat of paint as it were. My bezels and overlays, with some minimal pseudo-scan lines, are there to evoke an effect rather than go for verisimilitude. I like to add more texture, smooth out the lines, boost up and flesh out the colors a bit, in the hope of making the game more tactile. I've been doing this for awhile and when done right the game becomes more immersive, like it did back in the old arcade days. That's harder to do now because we've been spoiled by OLED and 4k and we can see a difference. So the art of this is to evoke that old school spirit as opposed to just simulate it. I can't even play a real life arcade game in a cabinet now without feeling the yuck of bad resolution and blown out colors and gamma. It's the same problem you see with this 60p movies with higher frame rates. You can see more, but now it loses some sense of mystery and feels faker somehow. Like a movie being filmed rather than the soft organic film you immerse yourself in.

However, despite all that cultural regression, I'm able to achieve a nice balance now between the past and the future with my tools at my disposal for at least video games.

If that's not for you, then more power to you. But I don't like my games to feel like video games, if that makes sense? Back in the day, there were magic and came to life as something you felt you could step into.

My 2 cents.

You'll have to forgive me for not agreeing with your aesthetic vision, but the badly squished artwork at the borders does rather hurt your sales pitch for that screenshot, crt filter aside. ner0's filter settings look better, imo.

Plus, some of us like to upscale the graphics too, and give these older games a nice HD fresh-coat of paint as it were.

HD is not inherently "better" if it compromises on aesthetics (see: Final Fantasy X's remasters making the character models more harshly shaded and their facial expressions worse and less expressive than the PS2 original). Trying to add your own "improvements" risks turning you into the videogame version of Cecilia Giménez.

bareknuckleroo wrote:You'll have to forgive me for not agreeing with your aesthetic vision, but the badly squished artwork at the borders does rather hurt your sales pitch for that screenshot, crt filter aside. ner0's filter settings look better, imo.

Plus, some of us like to upscale the graphics too, and give these older games a nice HD fresh-coat of paint as it were.

HD is not inherently "better" if it compromises on aesthetics (see: Final Fantasy X's remasters making the character models more harshly shaded and their facial expressions worse and less expressive than the PS2 original). Trying to add your own "improvements" risks turning you into the videogame version of Cecilia Giménez.

Listening to you is like listening to a video game zealous Michael Scott

Well…be as sarcastic and as condescending as you want, Mike, but you don’t know what you’re talking about, troll. Lol For starters, a “screenshot” isn’t the game in play. Doesn’t do it justice. You’d have to try it on my rig for an overall sense of what I achieved there, ye who is of so little faith. Secondly, your fallacious reasoning (in comparing it to FF) is just you being antisocial in your contrarianism. Thirdly, leave ‘wit’ (i.e. you’re unprovoked, uncalled for, lame attempt at insults) to the professionals. Robin Williams you ain’t and this ain’t amateur hour. I know you think you’re Adrian Cronauer here, but you’re actually Lt. Steven Hauk. So, Lieutenant…buy yourself your nice easy Sega Genesis mini from Amazon so you can hook it up to your easy to use LCD tv so your friends can go Ooooooooh! and brag about your zealotry with those who might care, and leave the rest of us who don’t the f*** alone. Cheers.

Play nice, kids. First and last warning. Thank you.