4 ms·
I've always had lower end hardware than my peers (still do, except at work!) so maybe you had a different experience than I did... But here goes my experience:
by daveloyall 10y ago
I've always had lower end hardware than my peers (still do, except at work!) so maybe you had a different experience than I did... But here goes my experience:
Emulators are much harder to play than the original console because milliseconds matter! Maybe not so much for puzzle games (like the Zelda franchise)[0] but certainly for action titles...
I don't know much about this "RetroPie", but it sounds like a raspberry pi, probably running an emulator on Linux. That's not hardware.
On NES hardware, your controller had a very real, physical connection to logic gates on the CPU (which happened to have a very real, physical connection to the electrons being shot towards your face by your TV!)
When using an old Nintendo, (or SNES, or N64, but only for SOME games) you got to experience your own limitations. The machine was faster than you, it never got hand cramps, etc. But it clearly wasn't smarter, it wasn't BETTER. People had beaten these games... So could you. You just have to try harder! You'd find yourself doing funny little things like holding the controller differently and trying to just shake your button finger, not actually raise and lower it, to fire as fast as possible...
When you finally did beat a game, you beat the exact same game, the same experience that other players faced, down to the millisecond.
...
0: Sure, there is some skill, but quite frequently the goal is to unlock some door or get some item. I never had any trouble playing Zelda games on emulators.
- huangc10 10y agoGreat points. Yeh, I was more of an RPG enthusiast. Dragonball, Pokemon etc. when I did play action games, I didn't notice too much but I'm sure you're right, there probably was delay. I didn't have controllers back then anyway. I always just used the keyboard...
- daveloyall 10y agoAfter I wrote that, I found out that by my definition, this new NES is "not hardware", either. Hmm... I guess that Nintendo has thoroughly tested it...
- ajford 10y agoOne thing to consider is this NES Classic Edition appears to be an emulator. It consists of an ARM processor and some flash memory, so it's not going to get you that cycle accurate emulation any better than the current leading emulators (other than any improvements brought about by internal knowledge held by Nintendo).
- oxide 10y agosomeone has torn it apart. IIRC it's a custom board, but yeah, it's just emulation.
- ashark 10y agoThe controller you use can make a difference in perceived responsiveness, too. If I plug an xbox 360 controller in to my Lakka box, I can't get past Piston Hondo in Punch Out (inaccurate dpad) and run off of ledges constantly in Mario (dpad issues again, plus too-slow switching between A and B buttons). Feels like it's lagging, but my PS3 controller, even over Bluetooth, eliminates the problem. Even do fine at High Speed, which is very latency-sensitive. [edit] fix street fighter/punch out character name mixup
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoThe main disconnect is how much buffering/pipelining there is of inputs and outputs on modern platforms. This affects native games just as much as emulators, but most people don't complain because they're used to it. Modern systems driving LCD TVs routinely hit total input latency of 5+ frames. Oddly enough, we might get the necessary stack enhancements for lower input latency thanks to VR development, since in VR it's associated with vertigo and motion sickness. It would be pretty funny if a VR headset turned out to be the best display for old-school 2D games.
- NTripleOne 10y ago>TV Found the source of 90~% of the latency.