[Retrohood ReShade] How to achieve a retro CRT aesthetic with your favourite pixelated games

Overview

This guide explains how to achieve a vintage aesthetic designed to enhance pixelated games. It utilizes a custom ReShade profile and is recommended for retro CRT enthusiasts. It has individual profiles for 720p, 1080p and 2160p screen resolutions. 1440p is supported using the 1080p profile. The performance hit should be minimal.

Download and Install Retrohood ReShade

Hello there! This little project was inspired by the ineffably cute and addictive Baba Is You, and Noita. Two perfectly sculpted nostalgia trips by Nolla Games.

Firstly, for those who have no idea what ReShade is, and what it can do; ReShade is a generic post-processing injector for games and video software. This injector allows you to configure different effects for your PC games. These effects range from contrast and colour grading modifications, to simulating the noise of a VHS tape player.

Having grown up with a Commodore 64, I’m particularly enamoured by any effect that replicates the retro CRT aesthetic. I wondered how this kind of look can be achieved by using freely available software, whilst minimising performance impact.

My Retrohood profiles have been minimally setup to use the default ReShade filters. The scanlines are achieved using a specially converted RetroArch filter thanks to Matsilagi.

• Deband – Reduces gradient banding, disable this if you experience a performance drop
• PPFXBloom – Optional mild phosphor blooming – Disabled by default
• Chromatic Abberration – Simulates a modulating RF signal
• Colourfulness – Boosts the saturation for all colours
• Vibrance – Gives a saturation boost to darker colours only
• Tint – Adds a slightly warmer tint
• GaussianBlur – Blurs the pixels slightly to reduce scanline artifacting and scrolling issues
• LumaSharpen – Simulates S-Video sharpness
• FilmGrain – General noise, optional
• ScanlinesAbs – Super efficient scanlines!

It is important to note that ReShade uses its own FX shader language. This means that RetroArch CG, GLSL or Slang shaders must converted by hand in order to be compatible with ReShade.

Download Retrohood for the correct game from Google Drive[drive.google.com]

Extract the contents of the archive into the game folder using 7-Zip[www.7-zip.org]

For example, to install Retrohood ReShade for Noita, the game folder should look like this if done correctly (I have highlighted the newly installed files for clarity-sake).

How to configure Retrohood ReShade

1. Load the game. If installed correctly, you will notice a ReShade banner notification at the top of the screen.
2. Once the game has finished loading, you can press the HOME key to activate the ReShade interface.
3. Choose the correct screen resolution profile. I recommend playing in 2160p to achieve the best look.
4. Turn on/off the available Shader FX options to your taste.
5. Enjoy the aesthetic!

The order of each shader FX within the ReShade UI will influence the resulting image. Unless you know what you’re doing, please do not move any individual FX to different positions in the initialisation chain. For example, if you move PPFXBloom below Chromatic Abberration, it will create an unrealistic look where it brightens the edges of a shifted colour.

I have recorded a YouTube video demonstrating how each shader effect can be toggled on/off. If you’re feeling brave, you can also configure the advanced options for each effect. In order to do this, you must disable Performance Mode using the checkbox located at the bottom right of the ReShade interface.

The scanline implementation enabled on all profiles by default is scanlines-abs. This is my personal recommendation and it is also the most efficient method.

P.S.

Thank you to Nolla Games, Crosire, MartyMcFly and Matsilagi.

R.I.P. my original Commodore 64 🖤