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.

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tombert 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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chongli 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Since most retro games ran around 60fps, so about 17ms,

That’s an oversimplification. Many retro game consoles don’t use a frame buffer. Instead they render the game state to the screen on the fly, one scanline at a time, and they’re able to process input mid-screen because they read the controller input many times faster than 60Hz (on the order of 2kHz). In practice, this means input lag is way below even 1ms.

Lightgun games, for example, rely on very precise timing of the control input vs the CRT raster and simply do not work without a CRT.

	▲	mrob 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>Lightgun games, for example, rely on very precise timing of the control input vs the CRT raster and simply do not work without a CRT. Perhaps the most famous light gun game of all time (Duck Hunt on the NES), does not rely on especially precise timing. It draws one white rectangle per frame over each duck when you pull the trigger and checks if the Zapper can see it. LCD latency will probably still break this, but it's not like the later Super Scope for the SNES that actually does track the precise raster position. I expect it would be possible to patch the timing in software to make it work for a specific model of LCD. But even if you did this, the Zapper also includes a bandpass filter at the CRT horizontal retrace rate (about 15kHz) to better reject other light sources, so you'd need to mod it to bypass that, or mod the LCD to strobe the backlight at the right frequency.
	▲	tombert an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not disputing that CRTs have lower input lag than LCDs or OLED. I was disputing the specific 50ms of lag claim that the parent post made; modern LCDs aren't that bad, and OLEDs are getting to a point that it's getting close to undetectable to human eyes. Even with horizontal interrupts that could be done between scanlines, there's still a limit to how fast we can actually perceive it (and frankly I'd be skeptical of anyone that claims that the 8ms of input lag that an OLED is actually affecting your gameplay). For light gun games, yeah, that timing might matter, but I'm not convinced it matters anywhere else.

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jamiek88 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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pipes 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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tombert 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jamiek88 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting. I bought sonic origins as a palate cleanser the other day and I really feel like I can feel the latency. Sonic 1 was the only game me and my brother had for our mega drive so we know/knew everything there is to know!! Our speed runs were crazy. I don’t know if feeling the latency is just my age though, although I’m a semi pro SIM racer still and competitive in my late forties it’s a different kind of twitch reaction.

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corysama 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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...

If you have an HDR TV, preferably OLED, and miss the CRT look, check out the RetroTink 4K https://www.retrotink.com/

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HerbManic 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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vunderba 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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DiabloD3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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orbital-decay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

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7jjjjjjj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>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.

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anthk 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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tombert 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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anthk 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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tombert an hour ago | parent [-]

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 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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mrob 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.