4 ms·

Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able to do that very well with HDR displays [...] flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial. Visually I think

Not right now, but, soon-ish, we'll be able to do that very well with HDR displays [...] flat and Trinitron CRTs should be trivial. Visually I think we're really close in most of the ways that matter, with advanced shaders like CRT-Royale. However, there's an entire additional dimension missing from this discussion so far - latency. When paired with original game hardware up until the 16-bit era or so, CRTs offer close to a true zero latency experience. It's not possible to recreate this with modern tech. When we add up everything in the stack (display, input drivers, everything) we're looking at over 100ms of lag. http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency/ http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency... We're not totally without hope. As the (ancient!) article notes, higher refresh rate displays reduce many of these latencies proportionally. And for non-action games, latency doesn't matter too much in the first place. At come point it becomes Theseus' computer, but, if the goal is to preserve the boat, [CPLDs and FPGAs] work Well, for some parts of the boat.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> However, there's an entire additional dimension missing from this discussion so far - latency. When paired with original game hardware up until the 16-bit era or so, CRTs offer close to a true zero latency experience. It's hard to even match the input latency and general responsiveness of an NES hooked to a CRT TV with a composite cable with modern hardware, let alone something more-integrated. My usual test is "is it very, very hard to get past Piston Honda on Punch Out?" Often, with an initial, naive set-up, it's nearly impossible. Get it dialed in a little and he becomes easy (if you spent like a billion hours playing that game as a kid, anyway). But with many display + computer + controller combos it's just impossible to get it close enough to right, no matter how you tune it. That's my test because it's really easy to tell if the latency is bad, but if it is I'll find myself falling off things constantly in Mario, too, it's just harder to tell if I'm playing poorly or if the system's the problem. The NES is hard enough, add just a little latency and it's hellish.
chongli 4y ago
Latency is one dimension. Another one is peripheral compatibility. Devices such as light pens and light guns are incompatible with LCDs. These peripherals depend on the timing information encoded by the raster scan of CRTs. This means classic light gun games such as Duck Hunt for the NES are impossible to play without a CRT.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Doesn't duck hunt use an entire frame of black then white? You don't need raster scan emulation for that, just very low latency. Edit: Apparently there is a 15kHz filter inside the light gun. So it's not really about beam accuracy or brightness, it's about pulsing at the right frequency.
  - chongli 4y ago
    LCDs aren't capable of pulsing at 15kHz. The twisting/untwisting of the liquid crystals is an electromechanical process and very slow (compared to a racing electron beam). Even though the fastest gaming LCD monitors claim a 360Hz refresh rate, they cannot get anywhere near this 2.8ms latency (implied) when going from black to white (0 to 100% brightness). Of course, the monitor manufacturers go to great lengths to avoid talking about it, so the whole industry is flooded with a bunch of marketing material to distract from the issue.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > LCDs aren't capable of pulsing at 15kHz. Yeah, I know. But you don't need the LCD to pulse, you need the backlight to pulse. An LCD might still have issues switching fast enough, but an HDR OLED tuned to 15kHz PWM might be able to handle it. If it was designed with minimum latency in mind of course. Most screens buffer a full frame and that won't work. But playing duck hunt doesn't require timing the actual beam as it sweeps across the screen. You just need to be displaying rows with a buffer that's no more than a few rows high, and have the rows flicker. Also many third party controllers don't care that much about the flicker.
      - chongli 4y ago
        Oh, with OLED you could probably design it to mimic the raster scan of a CRT perfectly, cascading the row and column signals along at 15kHz. The issue is, who is going to build that? I don't think Duck Hunt is too high on the priority list for OLED panel makers. The really sad thing is that some day all of the CRTs will be dead and all of the expertise to build them too. The tooling and factories are already gone, so it's unlikely new CRTs will ever be built, unless some Ben Krasnow-esque super-hobbyist gets really passionate about it.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> However, there's an entire additional dimension missing from this discussion so far - latency. When paired with original game hardware up until the 16-bit era or so, CRTs offer close to a true zero latency experience. It's hard to even match the input latency and general responsiveness of an NES hooked to a CRT TV with a composite cable with modern hardware, let alone something more-integrated. My usual test is "is it very, very hard to get past Piston Honda on Punch Out?" Often, with an initial, naive set-up, it's nearly impossible. Get it dialed in a little and he becomes easy (if you spent like a billion hours playing that game as a kid, anyway). But with many display + computer + controller combos it's just impossible to get it close enough to right, no matter how you tune it. That's my test because it's really easy to tell if the latency is bad, but if it is I'll find myself falling off things constantly in Mario, too, it's just harder to tell if I'm playing poorly or if the system's the problem. The NES is hard enough, add just a little latency and it's hellish.

chongli 4y ago

Latency is one dimension. Another one is peripheral compatibility. Devices such as light pens and light guns are incompatible with LCDs. These peripherals depend on the timing information encoded by the raster scan of CRTs. This means classic light gun games such as Duck Hunt for the NES are impossible to play without a CRT.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Doesn't duck hunt use an entire frame of black then white? You don't need raster scan emulation for that, just very low latency. Edit: Apparently there is a 15kHz filter inside the light gun. So it's not really about beam accuracy or brightness, it's about pulsing at the right frequency.
- chongli 4y ago
  LCDs aren't capable of pulsing at 15kHz. The twisting/untwisting of the liquid crystals is an electromechanical process and very slow (compared to a racing electron beam). Even though the fastest gaming LCD monitors claim a 360Hz refresh rate, they cannot get anywhere near this 2.8ms latency (implied) when going from black to white (0 to 100% brightness). Of course, the monitor manufacturers go to great lengths to avoid talking about it, so the whole industry is flooded with a bunch of marketing material to distract from the issue.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > LCDs aren't capable of pulsing at 15kHz. Yeah, I know. But you don't need the LCD to pulse, you need the backlight to pulse. An LCD might still have issues switching fast enough, but an HDR OLED tuned to 15kHz PWM might be able to handle it. If it was designed with minimum latency in mind of course. Most screens buffer a full frame and that won't work. But playing duck hunt doesn't require timing the actual beam as it sweeps across the screen. You just need to be displaying rows with a buffer that's no more than a few rows high, and have the rows flicker. Also many third party controllers don't care that much about the flicker.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Oh, with OLED you could probably design it to mimic the raster scan of a CRT perfectly, cascading the row and column signals along at 15kHz. The issue is, who is going to build that? I don't think Duck Hunt is too high on the priority list for OLED panel makers. The really sad thing is that some day all of the CRTs will be dead and all of the expertise to build them too. The tooling and factories are already gone, so it's unlikely new CRTs will ever be built, unless some Ben Krasnow-esque super-hobbyist gets really passionate about it.