retro gaming handheld overlays
index
introduction
if you've ever used a retro gaming handheld—such as the selection available from companies like anbernic, retroid, or powkiddy—you've undoubtedly noticed that many of the shaders which look so great on a 1080p or higher display don't look great at 480p. in fact, even seemingly simple shaders like scanlines can work surprisingly poorly (in the case of scanlines, especially in conjunction with blargg filters!). at the same time, many consoles—especially handhelds—don't fit into neat integers of 480, leaving a desire for interpolation and/or lcd shaders and/or bezels to fill out any empty borders. well, for a while now i've been making my own custom overlays for my anbernic rg353ps to fulfill that need. it has a 640x480 screen resolution, which means that these overlays will work for any console with he same screen resolution. some of them can be adapted to work with 480x320 screens as well. now, rather than always sending these one-by-one to my friends as i make them, i figured that it was about time that i make these available on this website. this will funcion as both a showcase of the overlays as well as a hub to download them.
nintendo - game boy
First up is my collection of overlays for the nintendo game boy. as you'll find, i make some overlays which are designed to work with integer scaling, some that are designed to work without integer scaling, and some which require custom viewport settings to display correctly. in the game boy category, we have representatives of all of the above.
this one is fun! it's an edit of the border included on the super game boy, recolored with the lime palette included in same boy. i like this over just using the super game boy overlay (which you can enable in the core settings) because it just looks nice when the whole screen is one consistent style.
this light grid mimics the way a dot matrix display works.
this dark grid isn't accurate to original hardware, but sometimes i prefer the look so i'll provide it.
i also threw together two without bezels for those who have a use for that but I haven't rendered any mockups for that, so these download buttons will have to do:
nintendo - game boy advance
the game boy advance has some very unfortunate disadvantages when displayed on a screen that is 640x480. its nearest integer scale is 480x320, which leaves an absolutely massive border around the display.
we can, of course, solve this using a bezel; courtesy of the game boy player this time.
since this is an integer scale, adding an lcd grid to this is trivial.
but what if you don't want a massive bezel? you want the image to fill the screen all of the way. well, first of all: use a sharp-bilinear shader if you have the power. sharp-bilinear-2x-prescale is ideal if possible. for many, this will be enough. the little black bars aren't too annoying, and the picture is sharp enough. but, there's always the option of a tasteful bezel.
and while it's more work, trying to anti-alias and cheat our way to an lcd grid that at least looks right, we can of course have a satisfying grid.
nintendo - pokémon mini
here's a console that looks just absolutely gorgeous on these screens! more specifically, it can be scaled within the emulator to a point where it looks very sharp and really just very good. nevertheless, i created a bezel and a grid. these are to be used without integer scaling.
The bezel with a grid.
The bezel only.
The grid only.
