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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
LCDs have a further issue that CRTs do not have: transition time. When an LCD pixel is displaying black and it is driven to white, the voltage change across the driving transistor happens a lot faster than the change in brightness of the pixel (caused by the twisting of the crystal). This has opened the space for a lot of display marketers to play games with latency numbers. Often they will quote numbers for transitions between 2 similar grey levels rather than between full black and full white, which takes a lot longer.
CRTs don't have this issue at all. The phosphor lights up extremely quickly to maximum brightness, even from fully black. It's a bit slower for the phosphor to "cool back down" to black, but it's much faster than an LCD unless you're using a specific high-persistence phosphor. Typical consumer CRT monitors had a persistence in the low microseconds, except the IBM 5151 monochrome monitor which was much longer to give a stable, flicker-free image for heavy office work.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
I hadn't heard this, but looks like you are right.
Makes me feel a little conflicted having bought one of those SNK bundles a couple years ago on Steam or Humble Bundle or something. Don't love the idea of giving money to someone like that.
Probably why Ronaldo and Salvatore Gannaci were DLC in the new KOF game. There was a pretty audible collective groan from the fighting game community when that was announced.
I hate that we are in the era of Millennial dictators feeling the need to own things that they thought were cool when they were kids. I don't see how owning SNK could be considered a great investment opportunity.
The payoff for MBS was to use SNK's brand recognition to promote the esports World Cup (run by another of his foundations). He even got to buddy up with some celebrities (Christiano Ronaldo and some famous DJ) when he shoehorned real people into that new Fatal Fury game.
Assuming this is well done, it's an extremely cool product. The original Neo Geo systems and cartridges are ridiculously expensive on the used market and bootlegs are rampant. Even though they're charging $90/cartridge, that's still thousands of dollars less than what a lot of these games go for used.
The biggest concern I have is accuracy. SNK wouldn't be able to just start manufacturing their old chip designs from the 90s again because a lot of the chips in the Neo Geo from other companies are no longer made, such as the 68000, Z80, and YM2610. This means that they'd have to make a new SoC that incorporates the IP from those chips. At that point there's no real benefit to the ASIC over an FPGA. It means the system costs less to produce, but if they find any inaccuracies in their new SoC design they won't be able to release an update to fix them. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'm not going to place a pre-order until they release more details about what exactly is going on under the hood.
Just a shout out to Incredible Universe that was stupid/smart (you pick) for putting a Neo Geo on display to allow us to play arcade quality games for free. There would be a small line inside the Video Games sections of kids queueing up to play World Heroes.Fun memories.
One can buy right now a MISTerFPGA from aliexpress for around €150 and that can emulate both MVS and AES. On this side of the pond, a VGA to SCART cable is all that's required to connect it to a CRT TV.
If instead one want the real HW, a working MVS PCB can be found for less that €100. A JAMMA cabinet would be the perfect place to use it, but with a supergun a CRT TV can give the same results. Cheap superguns can be found or built for around €30, fancy models can cost between €200 to €300 tho.
The carts aren't cheap tho, specially if original. I've only a battered "Puzzle Bobble" cart, it's a really fun game in PvP, but probably not the more iconic NeoGeo title.
Puzzle Bobble, actually, is definitely one of the more iconic Neo Geo title. If you open it, you may have a surprise. The game was such a success that Snk itself had to butcher other, less successful games (essentially Power Spikes II if I remember correctly), to produce conversions/bootlegs and answer to customer's demand. It has one of the best replayability of the system, it's very fun playing versus, plus, girls absolutely love it. There have been many sequels, but none live up to the original despite the additions, and they’re all more or less unnecessary.
Classic ! Try Magical Drop 2 or 3 and Money Idol Exchanger on the same system. There's a good chance she'll love them. They're a little bit more nervous tho, especially Money Idol !
NeoGeo! The system I will always remember as having fun fighting games in the arcade with a home console that only kids with "status symbol" money could afford...
Correct, but Incredible Universe had one on display for a very long time in the video games department and you could play World Heroes and other games for free! There would be a line of kids waiting to take a turn at World Heroes and I remember my friend and I playing the frisbee game. No need to goto the arcade when you could play these games for free.
This is kind of cool, but is there an actual market for this? I kind of understand the Analogue FPGA based N64 systems that were released given that there are a lot of people with N64 carts lying around their house, but who just has a bunch NeoGeo carts besides collectors? I guess a multicart is an option, but at that point, why not just go with MiSTer?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
LCDs have a further issue that CRTs do not have: transition time. When an LCD pixel is displaying black and it is driven to white, the voltage change across the driving transistor happens a lot faster than the change in brightness of the pixel (caused by the twisting of the crystal). This has opened the space for a lot of display marketers to play games with latency numbers. Often they will quote numbers for transitions between 2 similar grey levels rather than between full black and full white, which takes a lot longer.
CRTs don't have this issue at all. The phosphor lights up extremely quickly to maximum brightness, even from fully black. It's a bit slower for the phosphor to "cool back down" to black, but it's much faster than an LCD unless you're using a specific high-persistence phosphor. Typical consumer CRT monitors had a persistence in the low microseconds, except the IBM 5151 monochrome monitor which was much longer to give a stable, flicker-free image for heavy office work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's certainly worth trying the preemptive frames in RetroArch to see if you like it. Pretty low risk experiment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
FYI, SNK is owned by Mohammed bin Salman.
I think I'll pass giving them a single cent.
I hadn't heard this, but looks like you are right.
Makes me feel a little conflicted having bought one of those SNK bundles a couple years ago on Steam or Humble Bundle or something. Don't love the idea of giving money to someone like that.
Probably why Ronaldo and Salvatore Gannaci were DLC in the new KOF game. There was a pretty audible collective groan from the fighting game community when that was announced.
That's a shame, I've always had a thing for Neo-Geo and SNK games.
He won't get a cent when I play on my MVS carts on actual hardware, so there is that.
I hate that we are in the era of Millennial dictators feeling the need to own things that they thought were cool when they were kids. I don't see how owning SNK could be considered a great investment opportunity.
The payoff for MBS was to use SNK's brand recognition to promote the esports World Cup (run by another of his foundations). He even got to buddy up with some celebrities (Christiano Ronaldo and some famous DJ) when he shoehorned real people into that new Fatal Fury game.
I don't see how owning SNK could be considered a great investment opportunity
It’s not. It sounds much more like a vanity or passion purchase. Like how Neil Young once invested in the Lionel model railroading manufacturer.
Yep. I guess owning Metal Slug is better than his previous hobby of hacking up journalists.
Assuming this is well done, it's an extremely cool product. The original Neo Geo systems and cartridges are ridiculously expensive on the used market and bootlegs are rampant. Even though they're charging $90/cartridge, that's still thousands of dollars less than what a lot of these games go for used.
The biggest concern I have is accuracy. SNK wouldn't be able to just start manufacturing their old chip designs from the 90s again because a lot of the chips in the Neo Geo from other companies are no longer made, such as the 68000, Z80, and YM2610. This means that they'd have to make a new SoC that incorporates the IP from those chips. At that point there's no real benefit to the ASIC over an FPGA. It means the system costs less to produce, but if they find any inaccuracies in their new SoC design they won't be able to release an update to fix them. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'm not going to place a pre-order until they release more details about what exactly is going on under the hood.
There must be three dozen commodity Z80 clones, no? I get it that the other asics and dsps are impossible to source, but that's a strange example.
Just a shout out to Incredible Universe that was stupid/smart (you pick) for putting a Neo Geo on display to allow us to play arcade quality games for free. There would be a small line inside the Video Games sections of kids queueing up to play World Heroes.Fun memories.
One can buy right now a MISTerFPGA from aliexpress for around €150 and that can emulate both MVS and AES. On this side of the pond, a VGA to SCART cable is all that's required to connect it to a CRT TV.
If instead one want the real HW, a working MVS PCB can be found for less that €100. A JAMMA cabinet would be the perfect place to use it, but with a supergun a CRT TV can give the same results. Cheap superguns can be found or built for around €30, fancy models can cost between €200 to €300 tho.
The carts aren't cheap tho, specially if original. I've only a battered "Puzzle Bobble" cart, it's a really fun game in PvP, but probably not the more iconic NeoGeo title.
Puzzle Bobble, actually, is definitely one of the more iconic Neo Geo title. If you open it, you may have a surprise. The game was such a success that Snk itself had to butcher other, less successful games (essentially Power Spikes II if I remember correctly), to produce conversions/bootlegs and answer to customer's demand. It has one of the best replayability of the system, it's very fun playing versus, plus, girls absolutely love it. There have been many sequels, but none live up to the original despite the additions, and they’re all more or less unnecessary.
Ha! The only multi player game my wife will play with me :)
Classic ! Try Magical Drop 2 or 3 and Money Idol Exchanger on the same system. There's a good chance she'll love them. They're a little bit more nervous tho, especially Money Idol !
This is what I do. There is also an overclocked core that drastically reduces slowdown on Metal Slug games.
NeoGeo! The system I will always remember as having fun fighting games in the arcade with a home console that only kids with "status symbol" money could afford...
Correct, but Incredible Universe had one on display for a very long time in the video games department and you could play World Heroes and other games for free! There would be a line of kids waiting to take a turn at World Heroes and I remember my friend and I playing the frisbee game. No need to goto the arcade when you could play these games for free.
I never knew anyone that had one, but i knew lots of kids who wanted one
This is kind of cool, but is there an actual market for this? I kind of understand the Analogue FPGA based N64 systems that were released given that there are a lot of people with N64 carts lying around their house, but who just has a bunch NeoGeo carts besides collectors? I guess a multicart is an option, but at that point, why not just go with MiSTer?