The Division PSX

So this time I'm going to be doing something a little bit different. I've got a bunch of screenshots of The Division, but I used reshade to make it look like a PSX game.

Ever since Matsilagi ported the retroarch crt shaders to reshade, I've been interested in using them on 3d games. But while they looked great on 2d games with a little measuring and trial and error, I could never get 3d games to work in a way that I liked.

But eventually I found a set of settings that worked for me. The graphics adapter pro shader was the one that really made the difference. I used that to make the games only show at 384 by 216 while actually running at 3840 by 2160, so it's the native resolution divided by 10. That way I get integer scaling and it's fairly close to what the PSX would output. Before I'd been scaling the resolution by 8, getting a vertical resolution of 270, which I thought would be close enough to the PlayStation's 240p, but 216p looks much closer.

Another great feature of graphics adapter pro is that it let's you modify the color depth and add dithering. You can see it in the screenshots here, and it's probably the most important part to approximating the visual signature of the original PlayStation. Between those two things, you can make most games look like they came out in some bizarre alternate 1999.

Then after all that, the retroarch shaders are really just extra. Just set the resolution to match what you typed into graphics adapter pro, get the scanlines how you like them and find a mask type that you prefer and you're pretty much done. I mostly use either crteasymode or crtgeom myself, and I usually change shadow masks all the time cause I can never decide which one looks best.

But on the subject of the game, this one is definitely one of my favorites to have done this technique with. I was getting the most serious Parasite Eve flashbacks playing the game with these settings. I put the soundtrack on in the background and just wandered around for a few hours. It really does make me sad that the Parasite Eve franchise died the way it did, especially when something like this is what we could have gotten from the series if Squeenix still had an interest in it.

But I think I've probably gone on for long enough. So please enjoy the pictures after the jump.