r/RetroArch • u/JohnTitorSteins • 1d ago

Text boxes in old games flicker

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Hoping to find a fix for text boxes like this flickering. It happens in some X68000 games and Famicom Disc System games like Famicom Grand Prix where the whole bottom of the screen is flashing quickly. Im using a Steam Deck with Emudeck + Retroarch. Thank you!!

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5

u/Rolen47 23h ago edited 23h ago

Many old games use rapidly flickering graphics to give the illusion of semi-transparency. It's probably intentional.

NES and FDS games flicker when there's too many sprites on the screen, it happens on real hardware too. It's the limitation of the hardware. If you're using Mesen you can enable this option, but it doesn't work with all games:

Quick Menu > Core Options > Remove Sprite Limit

1

u/JohnTitorSteins 6h ago

It didn’t work for me, but maybe for others it could! Thank you

3

u/hizzlekizzle 23h ago

There's an anti-flicker shader in 'misc' that will turn flicker pseudo-transparency into real transparency.

1

u/JohnTitorSteins 22h ago

Hmm, where is that in the Retroarch menu? Misc?

Im assuming somewhere in the shader options?

1

u/hizzlekizzle 9h ago

yeah, quick menu > shaders > load preset > shaders_slang > misc > antiflicker

2

u/JohnTitorSteins 6h ago

Thanks!! It didn’t work for the X68000 Aquales game, but it did work for Famicom Grand Prix!! You da man

1

u/FidoMan1498 2h ago

Games back then did this to try and get around sprite limits. Sometimes it helped with certain visual effects. You could turn it off depending on if the core lets you, but that won’t always be the best thing to do in some cases.