3 ms·

The main problem with playing older games in a modern media-hardware environment is the screen. You've got the problem that lots of them look worse, or even out

The main problem with playing older games in a modern media-hardware environment is the screen. You've got the problem that lots of them look worse, or even outright wrong (see: transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog) on anything but a real CRT without some serious shader work. This is also true of older TV shows, to some extent, incidentally, especially if the only sources available are things like broadcast rips. Then problem #2 with the display (mostly) is latency. Those CRTs were fast. Even 50ms of rendering latency is noticeable on a some of the console games that require very-precise input timing. You get emulation latency (this may avoid that by using ASICs, at least); input latency above what the original hardware had, if you're not using the real thing (bluetooth...); any picture-conversion latency (this might avoid that, but I wouldn't bet on it) to digitize the signal into HDMI if you're working with real hardware with analog outputs; TVs that struggle to get under 50ms of latency, especially without making the picture look a ton worse; and then shader-induced latency if you're trying to make it look semi-correct. Like, getting it down to where it doesn't feel wrong is tricky as hell.

anthk 6mo ago
Metal Slug and Garou looked fine-ish with 25% scanlines on LCD screens and 50% on PC CRT's.
- tombert 6mo ago
  My first exposure to Metal Slug was actually in regular emulators, and I never used the scanline filters, so now when I use the scanline filters in Metal Slug they feel..."wrong". In my mind, Metal Slug is supposed to have really sharp, chunky pixels.
  - anthk 6mo ago
    Not my case; I'm old enough to play it at mid-late 90's in both bars and arcade rooms. And that's the problem with current pixel art artists: they have no idea of what actual pixel art looked like. Hint: look at Garou with at least scanlines (or maybe a bilinear filter) enabled. That's what's Garou almost meant too look in CRT, far closer than raw pixel art.
    - tombert 6mo ago
      I need to play Garou: Mark of the Wolves again, haven't touched that one in years. I believe that's the one that has a character named "Butt". I've played a lot of Neo Geo games, and I even used to own a full MVS machine for awhile with its own CRT (mostly playing KOF 99), but I guess the scanlines never did much for me. I grew up playing the SNES and PlayStation and N64, but I almost equally grew up with emulators, so I guess I'm just used to the raw digital signal being displayed.
      - anthk 6mo ago
        TBH pixel art on CRT's looked distinct, a bit smoother than LCD's. WIth just slight scanlines you could play the games well enough.
tombert 6mo ago
50ms is pretty high, even by LCD standards. I have one of those MiSTer Laggy measuring things, and when I have my cheap Vizio TV in "Game Mode" the latency is around 24ms, a little lower on the top of the screen and a little higher on the bottom, but still considerably lower than 50ms. Moreover, I think that OLEDs can get less than 10ms nowadays (though I do not have one to test at this moment). Since most retro games ran around 60fps, so about 17ms, we're talking about 1.5 frames of latency for the LCD, and about half a frame of latency for an OLED. With something like the MiSTer, you can also enable high speed USB polling, which I believe is roughly 1000hz. My understanding is that it doesn't work with all controllers, but it has worked with all the controllers I have tried it with. The composite video artifacts are definitely noticeable though; I noticed the weirdness of the waterfalls in Sonic when I was playing it recently. It doesn't bother me that much but I could see why it bothers other people.
- jamiek88 6mo ago
  Yeah with mister laggy measuring and my lg g1 oled (six years old now so it may have got better) in game mode latency is 8ms.
  - pipes 6mo ago
    Same here, Samsung s95b QD oled, mister laggy tested it, as far as I can remember it's about 8ms. Also snac adapters by pass usb entirely and are pretty much zero lag as far as I understand. Retro arch has run ahead latency reduction etc, I'd like to see some comparisons of that Vs mister. I could do it myself but I've never got round to it. I've noticed that fiddling with latency reduction in retro arch really works, but it is a lot of fiddling.
    - tombert 6mo ago
      I did the preemptive frames thing with Retroarch with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 a couple years ago, and I certainly convinced myself that I could tell a huge difference...and then I kept taking hits and dying just as much as I was without doing anything. It's entirely possible that someone who is better at video games can tell a huge difference (e.g. speedrunners and the like), but I'm afraid that I'm not good enough at most games to be able to realistically tell much of a difference. I might still fiddle with it a bit; someone told me that it helps a lot with Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which is a game I have never beaten with an emulator.
DiabloD3 6mo ago
I now own a QD OLED that has a processing+display latency of 1.21 ms in 240hz, 1.83 in 60hz, and an unfortunate 7ms with 120hz + black frame insertion. Displays are no longer the problem anymore, we're back to CRT speeds again.
- moepstar 6mo ago
  Do you mind sharing which make & model that'd be?
  - DiabloD3 6mo ago
    Asus ROG PG32UCDM3, uses a Samsung 4th gen QD-OLED internally. Its also the sibling model of the MSI MPG 322UR, and an upcoming unnamed Gigabyte model, so you have options if you want to get one. Samsung sells their entire panel assembly (panel, polarizer and protection layer, carbon bonded heatsink, and unified controller assembly, but not the power supply) as one package deal, and all the monitors measure identically and have near identical feature sets. I have mine setup to neuter HDR a bit in exchange for maximum contrast and no HDR thermal/power dimming. * image -> HDR settings -> true black 500, not gaming or console (both peak at 1k) * image -> HDR settings -> adjustable HDR (required for uniformed brightness) * image -> uniform brightness on (this prevents SDR content from triggering ABL dimming) * image -> vivid pixel: 0 (simple non-sharpening contrast enhancement) * OLED care -> screen saver -> all three dimming controls: off (outer vignettes to prioritize super-brights in the middle, global dims entire screen to preserve super-brights, screen dims if nothing moves for awhile) * system setup -> power setting -> performance mode And in Windows, System -> Display -> HDR -> SDR content brightness of 31 hits 120 nits (the recommended SDR white value from ISO 3664, Rec 2100, etc). If you're on SDR, set sRGB Cal mode and don't touch anything else in Image or Color, and it hard sets brightness to 120 nits. It is perfectly calibrated for the sRGB whitepoint, sRGB primaries, and even correctly does the sRGB piecewise gamma instead of the incorrect 2.4. Couldn't ask for more. Oh, and the best part? I cannot calibrate this with a colorimeter and improve it... I have finally discovered a monitor that can actually do its goddamned job accurately. We finally live in the future.
HerbManic 6mo ago
Latency has improved in the last decade or so but yes, it is still off. As John Carmack said once, we can send a data packet across the atlantic faster than we can get a pixel out the back of a computer nowadays.
vunderba 6mo ago
50ms latency would be extremely rough for games heavily reliant on frame perfect timing and lightning fast reflexes. I can't imagine playing Mike Tyson's Punchout for the NES with that kind of lag.
- lamasery 6mo ago
  Punch-out and High Speed are my two test-games. If I can’t land the multiball shot in high speed at the first opportunity, and I can’t at least get past the teleporting tiger dude in Punch Out, it needs more work. I’ve had initial attempts at an emulator set-up where I was losing lives on friggin’ Mario 1:1 though. Input and display latency so bad I was running into pits and stuff. Oof.
  - vunderba 6mo ago
    Ouch. I was pretty good at that game as a kid. A few years back, one of my friends got one of those NES Classic Minis which has Punchout on it, so I was pretty jazzed to give it shot. All of my timing was off, even Bald Bull was giving me a hard time. I was super pleased about that. Been a long time since I’ve felt that close to a gamer's equivalent of a redout thanks to the absurd amount of latency.
mrob 6mo ago
>or even outright wrong (see: transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog) If you're talking about the waterfalls, I'm not convinced blurring was necessary or intended. RGB support was rare in televisions in the USA, but it was common in PAL regions via a SCART cable, and the Mega Drive had native RGB output. Furthermore, the waterfalls are drawn as vertical lines, which I interpret as representing individual streams of water. If it was purely a pseudo-transparency effect it would make more sense to use a checkerboard pattern, e.g. as in the spotlight effect in Streets of Rage 2.
7jjjjjjj 6mo ago
>transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog That only worked because they expected to run over composite. Arcade cabinets used RGB which doesn't have the bandwidth limitations of composite.
corysama 6mo ago
If you can run RetroArch at 240 Hz on an OLED in "game mode", you can use CRT Beam Simulation to get pretty close to the CRT feel for motion https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks-better-than-bfi/ https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks... If you have an HDR TV, preferably OLED, and miss the CRT look, check out the RetroTink 4K https://www.retrotink.com/ https://www.retrotink.com/
orbital-decay 6mo ago
That's a predictable response, but I think you need to keep up with the times. Modern gaming rigs can do single digit ms click-to-photon latency in hugely complex game engines that have fullscreen shaders, which this thing won't have. If you're really concerned with the latency, use a modern gaming display and a sub-frame latency retro scaler (if it won't have a builtin one).

anthk 6mo ago

Metal Slug and Garou looked fine-ish with 25% scanlines on LCD screens and 50% on PC CRT's.

tombert 6mo ago
My first exposure to Metal Slug was actually in regular emulators, and I never used the scanline filters, so now when I use the scanline filters in Metal Slug they feel..."wrong". In my mind, Metal Slug is supposed to have really sharp, chunky pixels.
- anthk 6mo ago
  Not my case; I'm old enough to play it at mid-late 90's in both bars and arcade rooms. And that's the problem with current pixel art artists: they have no idea of what actual pixel art looked like. Hint: look at Garou with at least scanlines (or maybe a bilinear filter) enabled. That's what's Garou almost meant too look in CRT, far closer than raw pixel art.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I need to play Garou: Mark of the Wolves again, haven't touched that one in years. I believe that's the one that has a character named "Butt". I've played a lot of Neo Geo games, and I even used to own a full MVS machine for awhile with its own CRT (mostly playing KOF 99), but I guess the scanlines never did much for me. I grew up playing the SNES and PlayStation and N64, but I almost equally grew up with emulators, so I guess I'm just used to the raw digital signal being displayed.
    - anthk 6mo ago
      TBH pixel art on CRT's looked distinct, a bit smoother than LCD's. WIth just slight scanlines you could play the games well enough.

tombert 6mo ago

50ms is pretty high, even by LCD standards. I have one of those MiSTer Laggy measuring things, and when I have my cheap Vizio TV in "Game Mode" the latency is around 24ms, a little lower on the top of the screen and a little higher on the bottom, but still considerably lower than 50ms. Moreover, I think that OLEDs can get less than 10ms nowadays (though I do not have one to test at this moment). Since most retro games ran around 60fps, so about 17ms, we're talking about 1.5 frames of latency for the LCD, and about half a frame of latency for an OLED. With something like the MiSTer, you can also enable high speed USB polling, which I believe is roughly 1000hz. My understanding is that it doesn't work with all controllers, but it has worked with all the controllers I have tried it with. The composite video artifacts are definitely noticeable though; I noticed the weirdness of the waterfalls in Sonic when I was playing it recently. It doesn't bother me that much but I could see why it bothers other people.

jamiek88 6mo ago
Yeah with mister laggy measuring and my lg g1 oled (six years old now so it may have got better) in game mode latency is 8ms.
- pipes 6mo ago
  Same here, Samsung s95b QD oled, mister laggy tested it, as far as I can remember it's about 8ms. Also snac adapters by pass usb entirely and are pretty much zero lag as far as I understand. Retro arch has run ahead latency reduction etc, I'd like to see some comparisons of that Vs mister. I could do it myself but I've never got round to it. I've noticed that fiddling with latency reduction in retro arch really works, but it is a lot of fiddling.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I did the preemptive frames thing with Retroarch with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 a couple years ago, and I certainly convinced myself that I could tell a huge difference...and then I kept taking hits and dying just as much as I was without doing anything. It's entirely possible that someone who is better at video games can tell a huge difference (e.g. speedrunners and the like), but I'm afraid that I'm not good enough at most games to be able to realistically tell much of a difference. I might still fiddle with it a bit; someone told me that it helps a lot with Mike Tyson's Punch Out, which is a game I have never beaten with an emulator.

DiabloD3 6mo ago

I now own a QD OLED that has a processing+display latency of 1.21 ms in 240hz, 1.83 in 60hz, and an unfortunate 7ms with 120hz + black frame insertion. Displays are no longer the problem anymore, we're back to CRT speeds again.

moepstar 6mo ago
Do you mind sharing which make & model that'd be?
- DiabloD3 6mo ago
  Asus ROG PG32UCDM3, uses a Samsung 4th gen QD-OLED internally. Its also the sibling model of the MSI MPG 322UR, and an upcoming unnamed Gigabyte model, so you have options if you want to get one. Samsung sells their entire panel assembly (panel, polarizer and protection layer, carbon bonded heatsink, and unified controller assembly, but not the power supply) as one package deal, and all the monitors measure identically and have near identical feature sets. I have mine setup to neuter HDR a bit in exchange for maximum contrast and no HDR thermal/power dimming. * image -> HDR settings -> true black 500, not gaming or console (both peak at 1k) * image -> HDR settings -> adjustable HDR (required for uniformed brightness) * image -> uniform brightness on (this prevents SDR content from triggering ABL dimming) * image -> vivid pixel: 0 (simple non-sharpening contrast enhancement) * OLED care -> screen saver -> all three dimming controls: off (outer vignettes to prioritize super-brights in the middle, global dims entire screen to preserve super-brights, screen dims if nothing moves for awhile) * system setup -> power setting -> performance mode And in Windows, System -> Display -> HDR -> SDR content brightness of 31 hits 120 nits (the recommended SDR white value from ISO 3664, Rec 2100, etc). If you're on SDR, set sRGB Cal mode and don't touch anything else in Image or Color, and it hard sets brightness to 120 nits. It is perfectly calibrated for the sRGB whitepoint, sRGB primaries, and even correctly does the sRGB piecewise gamma instead of the incorrect 2.4. Couldn't ask for more. Oh, and the best part? I cannot calibrate this with a colorimeter and improve it... I have finally discovered a monitor that can actually do its goddamned job accurately. We finally live in the future.

HerbManic 6mo ago

Latency has improved in the last decade or so but yes, it is still off. As John Carmack said once, we can send a data packet across the atlantic faster than we can get a pixel out the back of a computer nowadays.

vunderba 6mo ago

50ms latency would be extremely rough for games heavily reliant on frame perfect timing and lightning fast reflexes. I can't imagine playing Mike Tyson's Punchout for the NES with that kind of lag.

lamasery 6mo ago
Punch-out and High Speed are my two test-games. If I can’t land the multiball shot in high speed at the first opportunity, and I can’t at least get past the teleporting tiger dude in Punch Out, it needs more work. I’ve had initial attempts at an emulator set-up where I was losing lives on friggin’ Mario 1:1 though. Input and display latency so bad I was running into pits and stuff. Oof.
- vunderba 6mo ago
  Ouch. I was pretty good at that game as a kid. A few years back, one of my friends got one of those NES Classic Minis which has Punchout on it, so I was pretty jazzed to give it shot. All of my timing was off, even Bald Bull was giving me a hard time. I was super pleased about that. Been a long time since I’ve felt that close to a gamer's equivalent of a redout thanks to the absurd amount of latency.

mrob 6mo ago

>or even outright wrong (see: transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog) If you're talking about the waterfalls, I'm not convinced blurring was necessary or intended. RGB support was rare in televisions in the USA, but it was common in PAL regions via a SCART cable, and the Mega Drive had native RGB output. Furthermore, the waterfalls are drawn as vertical lines, which I interpret as representing individual streams of water. If it was purely a pseudo-transparency effect it would make more sense to use a checkerboard pattern, e.g. as in the spotlight effect in Streets of Rage 2.

7jjjjjjj 6mo ago

>transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog That only worked because they expected to run over composite. Arcade cabinets used RGB which doesn't have the bandwidth limitations of composite.

corysama 6mo ago

If you can run RetroArch at 240 Hz on an OLED in "game mode", you can use CRT Beam Simulation to get pretty close to the CRT feel for motion https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks-better-than-bfi/ https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks... If you have an HDR TV, preferably OLED, and miss the CRT look, check out the RetroTink 4K https://www.retrotink.com/ https://www.retrotink.com/

orbital-decay 6mo ago

That's a predictable response, but I think you need to keep up with the times. Modern gaming rigs can do single digit ms click-to-photon latency in hugely complex game engines that have fullscreen shaders, which this thing won't have. If you're really concerned with the latency, use a modern gaming display and a sub-frame latency retro scaler (if it won't have a builtin one).