| ▲ | chongli 3 hours ago | |
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. | ||