26" LCD MONITOR!!!

[bkenobi]

Emulating the NES is a losing battle.  It's just not much fun to press the button and watch Mario jump a second later and it's just not worth spending a ton on a PC powerful enough to overcome that.

I haven't played that much NES on my cab, but SNES plays fine.  I've played plenty of Mario Kart 64 and that seems perfectly playable as well.  What's wrong with NES emulation?  Maybe I need to fire up some Mario Brothers this evening!   

[ChadTower]

Fire up Punchout.  The NES has some games that really require hardware speed.

[DillonFoulds]

As to the whole 720p LCD vs NES debate, i can say i was using composite out rather than RF, so maybe that contributes something? I didn't end up testing out RF, i couldn't find any adapters, and i had plenty of composite/coaxial (not RF) cabling handy.

I'm not experienced with reading schematics beyond an LED/resistor circuit, but judging by THIS schematic, there looks to be some post-processing between the Video Line Level Out (RCA) and the Video RF out, before the RF Out RCA/TV Passthrough adapter.

Maybe it's nothing, and the house brand TV i bought really was crap. Just trying to help shed some light.

[Loafmeister]

Fire up Punchout.  The NES has some games that really require hardware speed.

What do you consider as "hardware speed"?  I'm not trying to be funny, when talking about old console emulation, it seems some consider a 500 mhz pc as blazingly fast while others might consider a 3ghz single core "underpowered".

I don't recall any input delay when I used to play NES games on my 500mhz pc but that's a while back, so my memory might be messed up. 

[ChadTower]

I'm talking about the difference between electrons to a processor and electrons to a processor which must then translate the opcodes from the emulated processor into its own opcodes and then execute them.  95% of the time the difference is going to be imperceptible.  Some games, though, are close enough that it does make a difference if you're good enough at them.  Punchout on the NES is usually the best example of this.  I know several people who can beat it on the original hardware.  None of them can beat it on an emulator - the timing just isn't close enough.