A major overhaul for my CRTs

I've been hearing community suggestions and critics and decided to build a variation system with new features for each simulated display. The main concept behind my new variation system leverages on five different factors to deliver a staggering 56 per-screen combinations: 🤯

1. CRT technology: APERTURE GRILLE, DOT MASK, SLOT MASK, PLASMA
2. Connection cable: RGB and COMPONENT
3. Visual variations: ENHANCED (scalefx, mdapt), SHARP, SOFT, FAST (potato), MONOCHROME AMBER/GREEN/WHITE
4. Distance from screen: NEAR, NORMAL, FAR
5. Ambient lightning: DAY, NIGHT

These five factors are the extreme synthesis of major trends in emulation visuals in conjunction with modern needs and retrogaming tears. If you want crispy, vivid, better-than-original graphics go with RGB ENHANCED. If you prefer a bloomy, softer and bright experience, choose COMPOSITE SOFT. Moreover, each display will now came with monochromatic variants.

Here's some samples (view full resolution images to enjoy CRT details):

Monochrome Plasma / composite / Sharp @ Commodore 1201

Slot-mask / RGB / Soft @ Commodore 1080

Dot-mask / composite / Soft @ Ikegami htm-1550r

Aperture Grille / RGB / Sharp @ Sony pvm-14l5

While trying to make this chain behemot work fine,  I developed a distinct "global" profiles for each CRT technology, so now each device feels more like its real-life counterpart. The final effect is already impressive, as you will be able to taste the "visual feeling" instead of simply choosing a "graphic overlay". 

Now I'll take some time to better tune each display to make them even more distinct and based on r/crtgaming macro photos. You know, each brand and model had its own flavour, and I have to perfect this by using advanced quality protocols (aka trial and error, day-after testing, references comparison). 🤓

This comes with some technological limitations: first of all, I need to balance visuls for different generations of games to work fine, and some details (like accurate dot-triad shadow masking) simply can't be reproduced on 1080p. Replicating them by using mask references while zooming at 400% really is a waste of time, resulting in less-than-appealing final visuals (loss of brightness and sharness, general darkness, huge scanlines, moire effect).

I discovered this by... wasting lots of time. No pain, no gain! 😉

PS: my internal development version is now compatible with latest Mega Bezel Reflection Shader and exploits its new advanced features. 🤩