alt Hacker NewsThe 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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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/
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.
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.
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.
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).
>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.
Metal Slug and Garou looked fine-ish with 25% scanlines on LCD screens and 50% on PC CRT's.
>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.
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.