RetroArch Shaders Overlays & Boxart Easy Setup 2023

would you like your retroarch playlist to show box art cool do you want your games to go from looking like this to this or even this if so stick around and I'll show you how [Music] um let's start with adding box art and the retroarch main menu press F5 to get to the desktop interface select your playlist and if you need help creating a playlist make sure you check out our retroarch tutorial on a basic setup right click go down to download all thumbnails and select this playlist and it'll start to grab the box art back in retroarch's main menu I can now see the box art my playlist [Music] unfortunately it's not uncommon for retroarch to miss some of your box art there's a couple ways we can fix that first make sure your games are named correctly retroarch uses a naming convention referred to as no intro we can visit this page on archive.org to see how our game should be labeled the link is in the description in this example I'll open the Nintendo Entertainment System page and then either scrolling through the games list or using the search option I'll find the game Dr Mario I'm going to copy the text of the one that's closest to the version I'm using which is the US version Don't highlight the dot zip part just the file name back in the retroarch desktop menu I right click the Dr Mario game go down to edit and add in the text that I copied close and reopen retroarch and then download thumbnails for that playlist again and we now have the box art sometimes no matter how hard you try a box art will not update so in that case we have to use what we might call a brute force method to do that we go to a website called the gamesdb.net and we'll search for the name of the game that we need box art for we click on the game when we find it click on the box art and then save as [Music] retroarch requires a PNG file so we'll need to convert the jpeg we can do it through this online converter the link is in the description once it's converted we download it now with the retroarch desktop menu open we just drag our PNG drop it over here in this box art section and now we have our missing box art now let's talk about overlays what is an overlay well according to the retroarch website it's like a clear piece of glass that we can lay over our game screen to then add things of visual interest to let's see how to configure it and then look at some examples it's always a good idea to first update the overlays within the retroarch menu you can do that from the main menu by going to online updater and then update overlays I like to configure the overlays with a game already running so I can see what they look like so with the game running we go to the retroarch menu and we scroll down and the quick menu to on-screen overlay make sure that these first two items are turned on display overlay and show overlay behind menu this third option hide overlay in menu that's up to you as to whether or not you want to turn that on lastly I like to set the overlay opacity to 100 that way there's no transparency to the overlay now we can select an overlay preset I'm going to go into this borders folder and then choose TV integer as an example let's see what that looks like it's basically an old school TV around my image which is cool but you'll notice it doesn't quite look right and that's because a number of overlays are designed for integer scaling which we're not going to get into in this video but it's one of the reasons why I prefer shaders which we'll explore in a second let's take a look at an overlay that will work a little bit better for this configuration we're gonna go back into our presets and we're going to open this Mega Drive animated border and this one's pretty awesome you can see not only does the overlay have a Sega Genesis theme but Watch What Happens As I push the buttons on my dual shot controller they actually animate on the overlay itself while I'm playing the game that is pretty sweet so when it comes to overlays I don't really use them that often anymore when I did there was this great overlays pack that you could get on the retroarch forums made by a user called Orion's Angel if you're interested in exploring some of the options that are out there as far as overlays check out this post and I'll put it in the description below if you're enjoying this content so far why not consider giving a like it might even save a code man now we've come to one of my favorite things about retroarch shaders what is a Shader well keep in mind that games of the past were not designed for the high resolution displays that we have today that's why they look very pixelated on an HD TV or computer monitor so shaders are designed to improve these old visuals either by improving the rendering of the graphics or replicating the look of older TVs let's set it up and I'll show you what I mean I recommend you use the Vulcan video driver if you plan on making use of shaders overall this driver gives better performance in a number of cores in order to change the driver we go into settings drivers and then the video setting to load and view shaders we want to have a game running and with a game running we enter the quick menu and then go down to shaders and I like to have these two settings enabled video shaders on obviously and then also remember last used Shader directory now we want to go down to load and we can start scrolling through shaders if you're still on the GL driver you want to go into glsl folder if you switched over to Vulcan we're going to go into the slang folder let's load a Shader by going down to the presets folder and here's a pretty popular one we're going to scroll down and we're going to select scale FXAA and let's see what that looks like as you can see it's made the graphics a lot less pixelated and a lot more smooth you can use the toggle Shader hotkey which by default is comma on the keyboard and it will turn the Shader off and on just so you can see the difference real time now let me load up another popular Shader in a favorite of mine and I'll show you how you can use overlays and shaders at the same time [Music] now as cool as shaders and overlays are to get the full retro experience as far as I'm concerned you need to be using makeup bezels Mega bezel is a complex set of shaders created by developer hyperspace Madness these shaders provide a foundation that a number of artists and other developers have built upon to create a retro experience that is nothing short of superb I mean what they have done is truly phenomenal we're about to find out why let's take a look we can download the mega bezel Shader pack from directly Inside retroarch by going to online updater and then update shaders it'll either say slang if you're on the Vulcan video driver or GL if you're on the GL video driver we also need to download two additional Shader packs from the web and I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce these two developers names and in all honesty I'm probably not even worthy to we're not as always the links will be in the description here on this page we're going to download the zip and then we're going to come over to this other developers page we're going to click on code and we're going to download this ZIP now we want to go into our retroarch directory and we're going to navigate to the shaders folder and we just want to make sure that in our slang or GL folder depending on our video driver we're on Vulcan so we're going to go into slang and then into bezels and we just want to make sure that the mega bezel folder is there next we want to navigate back out to the main shaders folder and you're going to want to create this folder exactly as it's named here Mega underscore bezel underscore community and this is where we're going to unpack the two Shader Zips that we downloaded so you can open the first zip folder drag and drop it into the mega bezel Community folder we just created mine are already there so I'm not gonna actually do it in this video and then you can do the same with the second zip folder to use the mega bezel shaders there's a few settings in a retro Arch we need to confirm so let me show you what those are first we go to settings [Music] user interface you'll want to make sure that show advanced settings is turned on next we want to go to settings video we're going to go to scaling we want the aspect ratio to be full integer scaling off next we go to Output you want video rotation normal and then back out to the main settings and core and here we want to make sure that allow rotation is off with all those settings confirmed let's check out some of these shaders once again we're going to be in game and then we're going to open the quick menu from there we'll go to shaders load we'll hop into the mega bezel Community folder and I'll load up some of these shaders as you can see there's bezels and shaders for just about every system you can think of which is just amazing but I just want to load up a plain Jane TV Shader this is amazing notice the curvature on the glass and also the real-time reflection and glow on the side of the panel [Music] I'm back in the mega bezel Community folder because I want to load up another Shader that I absolutely love this is my favorite it really gets my retro and Nostalgia juices flowing [Music] this reminds me so much of the TV I had in my room when I was a kid and what it was like playing the old Nintendo on that screen at night this is just truly amazing and one thing I like to do to make it a little more authentic you can go back into the Shader settings and go down to Shader parameters and there's all kinds of settings here you can change but the one I like to change is viewport Zoom and I like to zoom in on the screen because as a kid I always sat super close to the screen I know bad for your eyes as my mom always said and then I like to Center the y-axis just so it's right in the middle and a little bit more viewable on my flat panel display [Music] if you're tired of seeing game over screens like this one make sure you check out our retroarch tutorial on hotkeys so you can become a master of the game one more important note about shaders when you find one you like and you don't want to have to load it up every time you open retroarch make sure you save it by going into the save menu you can save it as a global preset so that Shader will apply to every system and every game that you have in retroarch or you can save it as a core preset and it will only apply to games that you play on that system or core and stay tuned for a future tutorial on configuration files make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it I hope this video has given you a little more know-how on some of the amazing things you can do in retroarch a common question I get asked is what is the best Shader out there the best way to answer that question is to just play around with them try different things see what Suits You and most important have fun we'll be back soon with another retroarch how-to video and I do hope you can join us until then happy gaming my friends

Channel: OTG Gaming

Views: 23,770

Keywords: Retroarch shaders, shaders, retroarch overlays, overlays, retroarch boxart, retroarch box art, retroarch shader guide, retroarch shaders guide, retroarch shader tutorial, retroarch shaders tutorial, retroarch shaders setup, retroarch shader setup, retroarch overlay guide, retroarch ovelays tutorial, retroarch overlay tutorial, retroarch overlay setup, retroarch overlays setup, retroarch overlays guide

Id: 2M6zuIourIo

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023