There’s a cute trend emerging among PC gamers — presumably above a certain age — that has a few nostalgic types yearning for the memories of blurred edges and an unmistakable phosphorous screen glow. VHS filters aren’t necessarily a new trend, mind you, and CRT screen recreations have been around for a while in the game emulation scene.
Nevertheless, a particularly convincing effort from u/Tulired on the /LowSodiumCyberpunk subreddit stems from their fascination with the outdated tech and comes with a focus on realism, rather than the usual clichés of over-the-top tape degradation that you might see on trending smartphone camera filters.
Spend few days learning about VHS and decided to make an Reshade Preset. Thoughts? from r/LowSodiumCyberpunk
I don’t use the same ReShade post-processing suite as Tulired, which helps to change how a game looks without affecting any code of the original, underlying game. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with it, but I just have a more convenient solution for these kinds of fleeting curiosities.
Rather, I use ShaderGlass, a far more straightforward drag-and-stretch app that allows you to position a basic window over the top of any game (or any video, for that matter) and apply a wealth of CRT and VHS shaders. Even the default settings are good enough to satiate the nostalgia-loving retro fans, but there’s more under the hood for tinkerers.
Head to the latest releases page of ShaderGlass on GitHub to download the app (I’m using v1.2.3), then open it up and drag the window atop any particular image or game to your liking. One of the best features of ShaderGlass is that you can click through it and control the menu of a PC game behind it — the window doesn’t block your mouse input.
Personally, my favorite filter combinations for ShaderGlass are the pal-r57shell filter, found in Shader – Choose from Library… – Community Favorites dropdown menu, along with the x2 Pixel Size setting for better text readability and 1 /2 framerate slice for some real chroma-smudged ghosting trails. Naturally, playing a game on anything at 60 FPS or above to begin with keeps the result mostly playable — and the vhs filter gets closer to Tulired’s work.
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The newpixie-crt or crt-guest-advanced-ntsc filter is probably more to the tastes of our widest audience in the US, but I’m a tea-drinking geek on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean who grew up with inferior PAL formatting. Again, your results may vary depending on your PC game of choice, and some tweaks will be necessary if you’re playing anything with a lot of text.
Nevertheless, I’ve used ShaderGlass on some retro favorites from the SEGA Genesis (Mega Drive) era to recreate the childhood rainy days of staring into a fat-backed CRT television and giving myself sore eyes. The filters on offer are impressive, but Tulired’s work-in-progress VHS filter for Cyberpunk 2077 is arguably the best yet — I’ll certainly be giving it a go whenever it might release.
This all works on Windows-based handheld gaming PCs, by the way, if you don’t mind some small-screen interactions with the menus that were never designed for a controller. I can’t say I reach for a ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go with the intention of making it look ancient, but it’ll work there if you want it to — there’s no native Linux build for Steam Deck, though.
Do you crave the old-school CRT TVs of days gone by, or is this just another nostalgia-laden gimmick for gamers? Let me know in the comments if you’d use anything like this, and which games you’d use it with!
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