Thanks to PhilsComputerLab and to John Novak for their great help.

Introduction

A shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as shading. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of specialized functions in computer graphics special effects and video post-processing, as well as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. -- [Wikipedia]

Using shaders with DOSBox Staging will basically allow users to add scanlines, screen-curvature effect and so forth for the picture to look like on a CRT screen from the DOS era.

Screenshots provided below reflect integrated shaders bundled with DOSBox Staging. The following settings have been used:

output   = openglnb
machine  = svga_s3
glshader = crt\<name of shader>

Note: you can just use output = opengl. In any case, it makes zero difference as pretty much all shaders handle both opengl and openglnb under the hood and ensure the output is 100% identical regardless of which one is set.

For beginners or if you're unsure which one to try first, easymodeand fakelottes are solid choices. Some extra comment might help as well:

• fakelottes on 4K display, either single- or double-scanned
• aperture for single-scanned pre-VGA output on 1080p
• NO CRT shader for line-doubled 320x200 VGA or anything above that on 1080p (stick to the default sharp shader)

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Note: shaders with retina in their names are for 4k resolution. John Novak created them for use on a Macbook with a 4k screen.

Right-click on images and open in new tab to get the full resolution version.

Shader	EGA	VGA
sharp (default)
aperture
caligari
crt-aperture ega-lores-retina
crt-aperture vga-retina
easymode
easymode tweaked
fakelottes
fakelottes tweaked
geom
geom tweaked
hyllian
hyllian-updated
lottes
lottes-fast
lottes-fast subtlegain
lottes tweaked
mattias
pi
pi-vertical
yee64
yeetron
zfast
zfast-composite

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