Monochrome LCD shader?

[tobiasvl]

Hey! Does anyone know of a shader that mimics old monochrome pixel LCDs, like those found on graphing calculators? Something like this.

The original DMG Game Boy used a similar display, maybe there's a better chance of finding a shader like that out there? I did find this one, which looks pretty much perfect, but I don't know much about shaders so I have no idea if that's easy (or possible) to integrate with LÖVE...

Thanks for any insight!

[JJSax]

I'm a little busy to test it out right now but I believe the Moonshine Library has an effect that mimics gameboys. The effect is called dmg. I found it in this curated list.

Moonshine: https://github.com/vrld/moonshine
curated library list: https://github.com/love2d-community/awesome-love2d

edit: I found some time. here is what the effect looks like before and after.

Untitled.png (115.98 KiB) Viewed 5450 times

[tobiasvl]

Oh, yeah, I did see that one, but it's not really what I'm after. All it really does is restricting the palette to 4 green colors, but I'm looking for something closer to an actual graphing calculator or DMG screen, more akin to the shader I linked to. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Specific stuff I'm looking for in addition to the palette is the visible pixel grid on low-resolution monochrome LCDs, drop shadow on the lit pixels, etc.

Like this, from the page I linked to above:

[zorg]

There's a löve game on steam called Warlock's Tower that has this style; code's obfuscated though so no luck learning from it, however two things i can add to this conversation:
- Combining the 2-bit/4-color shader with a shader that makes a pixel grid like that could work; not sure if that exists as a moonshine shader yet or not,
- The other thing is that the aforementioned game might have actually been designed (like most gameboy games) to fit the screen and the palette; if you just want to drop this effect on as a shader, stuff might not look right anyway due to multiple reasons like the thresholds not being what you expect, and so on.

[raidho36]

I'd actually advise against it - beyond aesthetic value, it's a terrible way to display graphics in every conceivable way. Ask anyone who owned a gameboy - they hated its screen.

[JJSax]

--snipped
I'm looking for something closer to an actual graphing calculator or DMG screen, more akin to the shader I linked to. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Yeah I figured it wasn't perfect, and you were clear. that's just the closest one I'm aware of.

[tobiasvl]

I'd actually advise against it - beyond aesthetic value, it's a terrible way to display graphics in every conceivable way. Ask anyone who owned a gameboy - they hated its screen.

Hehe, yeah, not going to argue against that. I owned a Game Boy myself, and as a matter of fact I have later modified several Game Boys with backlights to get better screens. But this is for a very specific emulation use case, not for a marketable game.

There's a löve game on steam called Warlock's Tower that has this style
[...]
- Combining the 2-bit/4-color shader with a shader that makes a pixel grid like that could work; not sure if that exists as a moonshine shader yet or not,

Thanks, interesting game. The palette isn't really the interesting/hard part though, it's everything else! And there's no Moonshine shader with a pixel grid that I've found.

Maybe I'll have to learn this stuff and see if the shader I linked to can be ported to LÖVE/Moonshine...

[kicknbritt]

You could probably use that same gameboy shader and simply draw lines over it (the number of scanlines being width*height of the screen) inside a canvas scaled to the screen resolution.