I’ve been playing Chrono Trigger on the Steam Deck recently (Steam version) and found myself bugged by the lack of “retro” effect options. The game is great looking on a CRT or with the right shaders, and the raw blocky pixel look just didn’t suit it. Normally I’d just shrug and emulate, but I wanted to play the Steam version with the new translation, and wasn’t down to play it on the smaller DS screen. So like any lunatic, I went down a rabbit hole with Reshade and tested out a ton of configurations until I found something that looks pretty good on the Deck.
Links:
The Steam Deck’s resolution makes it hard to work with shaders in Reshade, since most shaders are designed with at least 1080p in mind, but I came to what I think is a good solution with the following combination of shaders:
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CRT-Frutbunn (main shader)
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EasymodeCRT (Slight sharpen native res, fixes frutbunn’s scanlines and brightness boost)
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Vibrance (slight color saturation increase)
I’ve included my settings with the screenshots below. I love the depth it’s adding to the image in the shading and making the characters look more grounded in the space. CT has really great colors and shading, but the raw pixel look kind of loses that. The effect is subtle, but really works well IMO. Might be hard to tell on the screenshots (be sure to open the full size images), but on the OLED Deck in handheld mode it looks great, and even has some bloom, just a really smooth but clean retro look.
I wasn’t sure if it’d be a fluke and just work for Chrono Trigger, so I copied the shader config over to TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and it looks pretty great there too (and as a bonus, makes the intro video look more like the old cartoon). Seems like this should work fine for any pixel art game.
Note: If you want to try this docked, it looks good on the TV too, but you need to set EasymodeCRT’s resolution (screen and frame width/height) to whatever your resolution is (I do 1080p docked, YMMV).
Full Album (Note - images don’t look great here, compression)
Better pics:
TMNT comparisons:
What a coincidence, I just got Chrono Trigger this Steam sale and I’ve been tinkering to get Reshade to look nice with it this weekend. Though with worse results than you, I was stuck at the “why do none of the shaders look nice at 800p” part. I will definitely try your setup, it looks fantastic!
For hooking Reshade into the game I used a Decky plugin called LetMeReshade. Quite convenient. https://github.com/itsOwen/LetMeReShade
I gotta check out that plug-in. I used the script before I knew about it, and then just kept using it since I read the deck plug-in needs a game restart for any changes, but I’m still curious.
What changes do need a restart?? For choosing different shaders and changing their configuration you don’t need a game restart.
Oh nice. I dunno what changes would need a restart, I just vaguely remember reading that. I’ll get the plug-in installed and test it out.
Edit - oh, different plug-in, it was Reshadeck I’m thinking of.
Yeah, that one seems a bit more limited.