Help CRT-royale on Duckstation: I can't get it to look right

[Stargazing Dog]

I tested out Retroarch for my PS1 games, and it is a nightmare. Hours of potential game time wasted just trying to configure it. One thing that is perfect is the crt-royale shader. Even with default settings, it looks just like the Trinitron in my basement. Some of the HDR shaders are also amazing.

Duckstation just works with no hassle... except shaders. I can't find any shaders that even come close to what retroarch offers. There is a version of crt-royale that loads, but it looks like poop. I have read and followed all the official instructions from the royale website. I've tinkered with all the settings. Nothing look right. Scan lines are either nonexistent or so large that they overlap the actual pixels. There is red and green fringing on white text.

Anyone using crt-royale with Duckstation have some suggestions? I am running on a 4K OLED monitor. I will also accept any other suggestions for anything that makes games look as though they are running on a Trinitron. I want the beam to have varying thickness. I want to be able to see individual phosphors when I look up close. I want scanlines. This was all a trivial task on my old RetroTink 5x. There are a dozen shaders in retroarch that do it without touching any settings. Why is it so difficult on Duckstation?

 

[contrail_]

I tested out Retroarch for my PS1 games, and it is a nightmare. Hours of potential game time wasted just trying to configure it.

That's weird. When I install retroarch on a computer (regardless whether it's running windows or some linux distro), I just have it do an update and download the emulation cores I need, as well as other stuff it deems necessary. After that it just works without much need for me to play around with settings. For ps1 titles in particular, I just use the regular beetle core (not the HW version) on retroarch and it works perfectly out of the box, even on a desktop computer from 2010.
Are you having trouble with bios files and their naming, or is it something else?

I've also used duckstation and it hasn't given me any trouble, but given the choice I prefer retroarch. In the long run, I would definitely recommend retroarch, though you do need to figure out how it works first. First time I ever used retroarch, I ended up having to watch over 5 different setup tutorials on youtube, because different people had different issues when first getting it to work. Once you figure it out it's pretty simple though. What's giving you trouble?