Thursday, January 31, 2019

RetroArch Wii U Slang Shaders

RetroArch on Wii U has supported slang shaders for a long time, but it's really hard to find them online. I found a pack of them, though, and decided to rehost it here. Hopefully, more people will get to enjoy them now.

EDIT (11/1/2019): To use these, copy them to your SD card and then go to settings > directory in RetroArch and set your 'video shaders' directory to that location.

Unfortunately, the GPU on the Wii U isn't particularly powerful, so relatively few run full speed, and there seem to be some weird scaling issues going on, leading to slightly uneven scanlines at times and broken xBR/Hqx effects. LUTs are also wonky, apparently, as many of the LUT-based mask effects are just scaled up to fit the screen instead of tiled across it.

EDIT: I thought the scaling issues might have been caused by it rendering at 720p and then upscaling to 1080p, so I changed the Wii U's output res to 720p but it still has a bunch of ugly issues. Mask effects are completely terrible. Currently, I'm just using misc/interlacing at a 2x scale to get even scanlines.

10 comments:

  1. I downloaded the file and unzipped in SD:/retroarch/shaders/shaders_slang/

    Then when running retroarch, I choosed "load preset" in "shaders" menu. I could browse through that folder but cant choose any shader.

    How is this file supposed to use?

    Thank you and regards.

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  2. Hello Hunter, can you help me to edit a ePSXe shader? I want to remove the curve TV thing style from it but I don't know how. If you need it I can upload the plugin here. Thanks!

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  3. Which shader is it, exactly? Usually, it's as simple as finding the function that modifies the texture coordinates along the curve and then replacing it with the plain ol' texcoord.

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  4. Apparently you have to compile these .slangp shader files with the Wii U SDK tools. Does anybody have a collection for those we can download?

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  5. @Unknown
    These are already compiled.

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  6. yep , just tried and retroarch doesn't find any valid shader to load

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  7. You'll need to set the video shader directory under your settings.
    I chose "SD:/retroarch/shaders" (no quotes)

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  8. Not working? When I load a shader, nothing happens, it just gives this error:

    "Warning: missing assets, use the online updater if available."

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  9. What version of retroarch do you use?

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  10. Everyone: it's counter-intuitive but you HAVE to set the Shaders directory in the Directory settings. If you don't, it will allow you to browse into the directory but they won't show up as valid presets, tricking you into thinking there's something wrong with the preset files where there isn't.

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