You pretty much can't any better than 1 frame per second of input lag with the way we currently write emulators. I am not a programmer, but from what I understand the emulator processes the game one frame at a time, and to reduce that input lag we would have to process the emulation in smaller chunks. Almost no one can detect 1 frame per second input lag. This only really became a problem with the advent of modern flat panel television sets the average of which will add a full 3 more frames to that lag. Modern games tend to be written with this in mind, old ones aren't.
Other graphical options in the emulator can increase this lag even further.
Going to be 2 frames per second lag minimum, at least one from the emulation and one from the LCD.
I would hope Nintendo fixed lag w emulation tricks. Well I just hope emulation isn't as bad as haze says it is. If it is bad, Nintendo could have hired an emulation programmer who jumped into the biz to write the code in short fashion. Does sardu still work in the electronic arts?
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yeah, byuu wrote a nice piece on it, but you're always going to get a bit of unavoidable lag these days simply because there are so many layers of abstraction involved, nothing is really directly driving anything anymore whereas back in the day the moment you read an input port you were pretty much reading a direct line to the button on the pad, and the moment you wrote a register you could change the output of the console to the TV in that very instance and the TV would respond immediately (which is why mid-frame tricks were common etc.)
these days there are buffers and polling rates to consider at almost every step of the way.
there aren't really any magic tricks you can do to avoid it, only minimize it, and even if you use the original systems with modern displays it isn't perfect (and some of the replica pads you can use with the original systems aren't perfect either, as they contain less direct logic than the originals too, a friend had a Genesis replica pad, for use with the Genesis, that clearly only polled the actual buttons at around 20 times per second)
input lag is hardly a new problem tho, just certain groups of people seem to have become very sensitive to it as of late*, some of the 32-bit consoles, and even earlier arcade machines actually have some quite bad lag as they were already starting to use sub-cpus / mcus to read inputs so you were already starting to get the layers of abstraction whereby one cpu needed to talk to another cpu to get the actual input state, likewise many arcade platforms would buffer spriteram because it made it easier to avoid graphical issues caused by rewriting ram mid-frame (meaning it was safe to rewrite ram mid-frame, allowing for better performance as they didn't have to cram all the video code in the vsync period)
of course those cases now feel worse because on top of the original lag there is the extra lag of modern hardware ;-)
* as opposed to people who have grown up with it, and don't even seem to realise it's a problem at all, there are plenty who don't even put their TV in 'game mode' for games, and sometimes that can add so much lag I wonder how they play the games at all. I actually switched a TV to game mode when I was playing at a friends place only for them to phone me a few days later asking how to turn 'easy mode' off in the game, because they didn't understand what I'd done but had become so used to playing the game with horrible input lag that it now presented no challenge at all without it so wanted things back to how they were, with lag. (they couldn't really grasp the concept at all tho, that it was the TV, not a game setting I'd changed)
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Topic: NES Classic demand is crazy (Read 18743 times)
