Gap between the two sources is all I'm concerned with. Nevertheless, if you have a better method, share it. I'm always open for new ideas.

EDIT: The video method I mentioned had only 1 frame of delay from source to camera, not 3 frames like you mentioned. So its still excellent for determing the gap between both the console and the fake (emulator)

for the record, I'm using a RGB NES through a XRGBmini to a Samsung F8000 LCD TV. The picture quality, to me, is amazing and I don't notice any lag. I accept that there must be some but it's imperceptible to me. I can feel it with "game mode" switched off though.

Fudoh on the shmup forums measured the XRGB-Mini to be exactly 24ms of lag. So you don't feel it, but its there. And the Samsung adds lag too. You can probably find out how much with a little research. You'll never "feel" it until it gets too high. But you'll definitely "see" it when you miss that precious jump, dodge that bullet, etc. Try Clinger Winger on Battletoads. Then try it again on CRT.

that's like 1 or 2 frames out of 60 in a single second? To me, that's nothing. YMMV.

24ms is roughly 1.5 frames. Add your TV's lag into the equation and you could have anywhere from 3.5 to 6 frames (check it and see). You've probably adjusted to it and cannot tell anymore, hence the fact that when you turn off game mode things feel different. Ether way, its highly unlikely you'll be able to beat the most timing sensitive games with that setup. Go back to a CRT and you'll see it right away.

You know, if you had a nes with 0 lag from the controller to the screen, on a TV with 0 ms lag showing the image, if you play punchout, there will always be 16-32 ms of lag between when you press the button and it starts your punch.  So that's a good way to view what 24 ms lag is.   The reason for this lag is two fold, it takes 16 2/3 ms per frame, and punch out always takes one frame to read the pad input, then the secnd frame to read the button input.  If you punched at the very end of the screen draw, you'd only have one frame to wait.  But if you punched near the begining, then it would take that entire frame, plus the next, before you reacted.   That's one reason I mention punch out so often, people dont seem to ever complain about it's built in lag.  

In total I guess it's about 3-4 frames including the telly. one 20th of a second. I fully believe you can perceive that difference, but I can't so I'm happy. I don't have a CRT because I don't want one in my living room because it would look awful and I don't want my NES anywhere but my living room. I'm stuck using a HDTV and so I've made the best of it. And I'm happy. I've tried to look for the lag, I know it must be there, but I can't perceive it and the picture is unbelievably good.

So long as your happy, that's what counts.

All consoles that run at 60fps record your input "per frame", or every 60th of a second. Yes so if you press the button at say, 1 or 2ms , then it will show up on screen at 16.7ms. If you press it at 8ms, then it may (or may not) show up at 16.7ms. You cannot say for certain if it will record your input before the frame is drawn, or after the frame is drawn when you press it late. How can you know for certain that it will respond later than 16.7ms? You cannot be sure about this.

But that's not the point. If your console lags 1 frame, then that's fine because the game was designed with that in mind. (the designers of Punch-Out were well aware of the 16ms controller response and took that into account)

The problem comes in when you add lag to it. That's the real problem, and that's what is being discussed. These games were not suppose to run with added lag. Unlike some modern games, retro games are not designed to compensate for this and thus, you break the gameplay ether slightly, or greatly depending on how much additional lag you slap on to it.

That's why I had a range of two frames. If you press before the input lines are polled, it'll register for the upcomming frame to be drawn, otherwise it'll have to be the next one.

If you press it at 1 ms into the frame, we're sure it'll register.  So if the game reacts to your button presses every frame (Not all do), thne it should react when the next frame is drawn.  So you have 0-16 2/3 ms delay by the very fact it's running 60 FPS.  Since punchout polls input for 2 frames, first dpad then button, it takes 2 frames to react to a press, so you have at least 16-32 ms lag, sometimes more if you had a bad timing on the press. Sometimes it'll even be more than that.

I don't get what you mean by " How can you know for certain that it will respond later than 16.7ms? You cannot be sure about this." In punchout, there's 2 frames needed for input, so there's no way for it to respond in less than 16.7 ms, unless I'm wrong about how the input is read (Like every other frame it checks the dpad even if not pressed; if this was the case then some punches would react one frame faster).

People like to complain about lag, and act like a slight amount affects their gameplay, without knowing they've been playing games with lag for years. 

Surely they knew that controller reponse time is 16ms on a 60fps game? And 33ms on a 30fps game?

Ether way, these games were designed with that in mind, so it does not count. Gameplay becomes broken when you change the rules (ie; add lag from an outside source, such as post-processing on a TV that these games were never meant to be played on)

In other words, just because a 60fps console has a 16ms controller response, doesn't mean that its "ok" to add outside lag to it. I cannot say "Well shoot, my console lags 16ms, heck with it, I'll play with 200ms on my HDTV cause, afterall, my console lags 16ms so what can I do?". That's just silly. But I"m sure you were not implying that we should just add all sorts of lag anyway.

I myself draw the line at 1 frame added. A low-lag PC monitor can have - oh say - 3 or 4ms of delay (like the Dell 2740). Then you use B0 mode in your XRGB-3 with adds 2ms of lag at most. After its all said and done, that entire setup will add 6ms of lag to your console. This should be fine for those who actually like LCD's. I cannot stand them, so its CRT's for me. Different strokes for different folks.

I'm not trying to argue either, just offering a different perspective, but it sounds like you are well versed and have considered the arguments on both sides and made your decision.

I typically play on a plasma display, though I think you are really overlooking how much LCDs have improved in just the last couple years. A cheap LCD from Vizio that I bought has what I would consider amazing picture quality. Is it as good as a plasma? Hell no. And yes, it has trouble distinguishing shades of white, as all LCDs do, but I've yet to encounter any situation where this became a noticeable distraction. I'm just saying that the technology has improved, and continues to improve. 

You're probably right that we'd be better off if lcd died, because then we could get affordable OLEDs. 

personally, I hate signal noise, color bleed, bloom, and not having straight lines across the screen. So the disadvantages of LCDs are outweighed by the fact that it uses hdmi and has perfect geometry, for me. I find the flaws in CRTs to be more distracting that the flaws on a good LCDs. And playing these games at 1080p on a plasma is glorious. I think the AVS/ HDMI NES is going to look awesome

as far as the dithering thing is concerned, signal noise might help some games look better but it hurts others. If you're looking for a single solution for all games, this consideration doesn't sway someone either way. 

It's cool, though- play whichever way seems best to you it's nice to have knowledgeable people offering different perspectives. 

My understanding has always been the better the CRT, the darker the scanlines. Arcade monitors had noticeable scanlines, and they were very noticeable on the Sony BVM and PVM. I always thought not seeing scanlines was the result of color bloom, bleed etc causing everything to blur together. 

THIS is what I'm talking about. I honestly don't know how anyone can look at that image and not see perfection. To each his own, I suppose. 

Well first, really we're all using the term scan line wrong, but everyone knows what we mean.  Really a scan line is one horzintal row of pixels.  So even the "non black" lines are scan lines.

How a normal 480i video works, the first frame it draws the first line on screen, skips a line, draws the next, all the way to the bottom.  Then on the second frame, it sends the half line signal that tells your TV to move down one scan line, and draw all the lines that were not drawn the last frame.  So you get 60 fields a second, or 30 frames.

240p is a hack; it is not a true video mode and does not follow standards. It sends the first frame, so every other line is drawn, then is sends the next frame, but doesn't tell the TV to move down a frame.  So it draws on the exact same scan lines again, skipping over the exact same lines on the TV. 

So when you look at say a 480p60 video, it would draw 480 lines from top to bottom, every image.  a TRUE 240p image would also draw every line top to bottom, but would only cover the top half of your TV, or would be streached to be the full size of your TV by doubling the lines.   What people call 240p is a 240p image streached to 480p with spaces in between every other line.

Most newer TVs knew this wasn't a standard, and even some older CRTs didn't follow this.  So they would just ignore what the video told them, and would display one frame normal, and next one down shifted one frame. Or for some TVs, it'll repeat the line twice.   There is no technical reason for an LCD TV to not have scan lines.  The fact that it doesn't use a electron gun means nothing for scan lines.  It's just how the TV decides to display the picture.

And knowing that many games would not use half the lines, many dedicated arcade monitors started changing the way they worked.  Some would make the unused scan lines smaller (Ok I have no proof on this part; I was told this 3rd hand), and some just did like LCDs do, and repeat the line above.  So it's still 240p, still 15khz, but showing 480p image.  (Or a 480p of a 240p picture).  If you find many arcade machines, look close.  The scan lines on a SFII 19" look NOTHING like a CPS2 SSF2 machine, diffrent style monitor.

And then you have games like mortal kombat.  Mortal Kombat was not 60 fps, but 53. 



Never mind that fact that this is all crap.  People talk about timing of games and act like the smallest change is the reason they can no longer play.  What the flying fuck do you think happened to most games when they moved from arcade to home machine?  Timing got butt-raped, and your now "perfect" ratios make no sense, because the nes is showing the same pixels at a diffrent ratio.  People (Ok, mostly Patrick think that the designers were tweaking the graphics to get them them perfect ratio on perfect screens.  BS.  They were rushing to get the game out the door in time for christmas so they could start programming the next port.

You're missing what I'm saying.  Besides the one "free" frame you always miss (Meaning anyone who complains about sub-16 ms lag is just being a baby), I'm saying punch out already has 1 frame of lag in it.  Always.  People do not know this, they do not detect that it takes an extra frame for your player to react.  Punchout is a game people claim goes bad with 1-2 frames of lag, because they don't understand how small 1-2 frames is.  Anything above that then you start having issues, but 1 frame?  1 frame is being able to spot what duck in duck hunt lit up first.

Also, you do know it's 2015 now. I think most of your complaints aginst LCDs have been fixed for a while now.  Chances are, you're on a windows machine right now, pull up a CMD window.  I'm assuming it looks pretty black to you unless you have a crap monitor.  My monitor's black blows the crap out of the black on my CRT, but they're new-ish and they're using slightly diffrent tech than most TVs.  There were full arrays of LEDs with local dimming to help.  And motion blur isn't something you should compare LCDs vs CRTs, after all it's the miton blur of a CRT that produces transparent effects when blinking a sprite on\off.  So they both have diffrent issues.  And newer monitors use a strobing backlight (Asus's lightboost for example) .  This pretty much turns an LCD into a CRT for the reasons of mition blur, so yeam you dont have the blur, but now you have flicker as your TV is turning off 120 times a second. (Vs the 60 times a second for a CRT)

The problem with new TVs isn't tha they're LCD and LCD lag, or that they don't product proper black levels.  It's because they're made by idiots who don't give a shit about stuff we like.  They add fancy modes that you can't disable.  All that lag is 100% unneeded.  There is no fancy processing needed to make a signal fit an LCD vs CRT.  It's stuff they add to try to make their TV look better in walmart.  As for the black levels, it's normally they're just cheap bastads (LCDs need more power to produce blacks then whites, go figure).

And for the record, the LCDs in my house would be stuff like monitors (all over the place), the arcade machine, in my car, and the TV in my bathroom (Shut up).  My main TV is my plasma because when I bought it, LCDs couldn't produce shit for blacks.  My main game room the video switch is a matrix style, so any input goes to any TV, so if I want to see the diffrence between the LCD Projection and the CRT, I just select the system, press 1 then 2 for output, hit select, and it mirrors the output to both TVs.


That 33" CRT looks kinda like a runt in there. And on the back of the console side is a PC running emulators (Ok, still need to finish setting it up, it's my old HTPC and mostly used for XBMC), so I can output it via HDMI or composite.  When I set up the composite, I used the nes on one input, and the PC on another so I could get the aspect ratio right. Still cant get the color balance right though, but my TV out card is teh suck.

In my response, I'm going add numbers beside your paragraphs above, and then answer them each below because I cannot figure out how to multiquote you. Haha.

[1] - I've seen exactly how much LCD's have improved over the years. Purchased some in 2006 and returned them. Purchased some in 2013 (along with XRGB/etc) and returned them. And I agree with what Fudoh told me, they haven't improved much in the last five years. But we now have "Quantum Dot" displays on the way. Oh gee, great, now I can have accurate dark grays for black! (sorry, that's an old joke from oled-info.com - ). There's just only so much you can do with an already fundamentally flawed display panel. I told Chad B. (the ISF guy) that LCD's should've remained in the things they were designed for, ie; clock radios and wrist watches. And he agreed. And yes, your right, they don't even come close to Plasma. Its funny, but my dad's old 2005 Pioneer Plasma SMOKED the LCD's I tested in 2013. That's sad. And guess what? CRT is neck and neck with the final Plasma's from Panasonic (virtually perfect blacks in a dark room).

LCD's need way too many tricks to even provide a watchable display if your use to Plasma/CRT. They require so many gimmicks and post processing. Its like an ugly chick that needs loads of makeup just to be presentable. Remove the backlight strobing, remove the local dimming, remove the insane amounts of post-processing and motion enhancers, and your left with the cold hard truth. Its the same as removing the makeup from Laga Gaga. A nightmare. (and something to watch out for is poor scaling when using scanline filters on the XRGB-3. Scaling done poorly can make those fake scanlines look completely uneven)

[2] - Geometry should not be an issue. Good calibration will make it 99% perfect. I don't need any better than that. Avoid flat-tubes from the early 2000's and up. They suck at geometry. The rounder the tube, the better the geometry. And regarding blooming, turn down your white level as its too high and will result in phosper burn and worse geometry. Color bleed never bothered you as a kid, but I guess it does now. Well, it doesn't bother me even as an adult. But hey, I use S-Video sometimes, and I have used RGB-to-YPbPr before too. But I just stick to S-Video as its almost as good, but not always. Just depends on the console.

[3] - Not all games use/abuse dithering, but all games prior to the N64 era were designed with composite in mind. The final test analysis was via composite and/or RF. Just look at some of the SNES development kits, like the one's from Intelligent Systems (google them). Those kits have Composite/RF output for a reason. So I don't mind using this. I've been able to calibrate one of my sets to the point where RF looks amazing and not much worse than S-Video. You just gotta know how to fine-tune things.

Nevertheless, as kids, we didn't worry about silly stuff like this and we actually played our games and enjoyed them thoroughly. If we didn't need razer-sharp, jagged pixels in 1080p back then in order to enjoy our games, then we don't need it now. Or at least I don't.

The poor blacks and motion blur kills it for me. So yes, to each his own.

I already addressed this in earlier posts. Remember when I said that my ISF guy (Chad B) admitted that even to this day, LCD's still suck at blacks? Also read two posts above, second paragraph with the [1] in front of it.

My PC monitor is a VA monitor with what some people claim to be "inky blacks". BULL. More like "inky gray". I could take you into any Best Buy today, find the best LCD TV, turn off ALL the lights, and sit it side-by-side with their OLED and you will re-think your idea of what black is.

LCD's only look black with there's tons of light in the room. Oddly enough, all that light will make a CRT look gray. But shut off the lights, and the CRT will show true black, and the LCD will show gray. Dark gray at best. And even full array local dimming cannot do a perfect job due to blooming from lit zones.

All the gimmicks (local dimming, motion enhancers, etc) in the world will never make LCD look pretty, for me at least.

Look at it like this. I grew up with perfect black levels, no motion blur, and no input lag. And now I'm expected to go backwards, and embrance poor blacks, embrace motion blur, and play with some hideous lag? Why please tell me, why? And when an ISF guy agree's that LCD's still look like crap compared to Plasma, CRT, OLED, then I think I'm in good company and no one will convince me otherwise.

Here's a solution for everyone. Wait for OLED's to become the standard, and get a virtually lag free PC OLED monitor. Done. Now everyone is happy.

Wow, I never realized just how much crap my first post in this thread would stir up. Things are getting out of hand. Can we just drop this and move on? By now this discussion is going in circles and nobody is going to win.

Don't worry to much about it, no one can "win" a thread, and this isn't really arguing. Just talking.

I will point out though, crt rvs do NOT put out perfect blacks. My main monitors and the one in our exercise room both blow my crts out of the water for blacks. The level of black on a cry depends a lot on the shadow mask or grill. But turn a crt on in a dark room, most put out a strong amount of light.

Yea this is the reason why I rarely post in forums. Forums tend to be filled with drama and bickering.

Ah, anyway, I guess I should have clarified mask differences. To get awesome blacks on a light mask tube, you have to shut off all lights. But if your tube has a really dark mask, this is not necessary although its still best. Every single LCD I've ever seen however cannot handle a dark room. Full array does decent however in this situation. About as good as a top of the line Rear-Projection CRT. But the motion is still terrible so the CRT wins in the end.

Lets all just wait for OLED's to become mainstream. And they will, as its already been proven that they will be cheaper to make than LCD's once all the kinks get ironed out. And by then, everyone will look back at LCD's, and laugh at them and scratch their head and wonder how in the heck did they ever love such a display. Not even nostalgia will make them want to go back and leave their OLED behind.

But aren't most LCD back lights too strong for comfortable viewing in a dark room anyway?

I for one think a balanced look best suits practical use. Neither overly vibrant whites, or dark Splinter Cell type games approaching unplayable.

As for RF and composite, part of my dislike for them is they're "dumb". Incapable of detecting which objects actually are dithered.

Much higher speed camera, a controller with LED that lights up when you are pressing a button AND the game is polling it, and a game that changes within the same frame as the buttons are polled    http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/...  On the one tv that I used both a NES and a Wii there was only a ~10ms difference, but that one was bad in general.

If you are measuring from the button press you will be adding 0-16ms (touched on above).  Using a 60 hz sample rate (your camera) you will be adding 0-16ms.  When you say something is 2-3 frames delay, but your error is 2 frames, you aren't getting a good measurement. Because it was X for years when they learned how to play the game, then suddenly it is 5X.  Those years of training are significant!
  And I look at that and think how the ugly scanlines mess up the smooth colors  

 You're right, geometry, color bleed and all the other flaws of CRTs weren't even noticeable until I had an lcd and a plasma display. Now I can't NOT notice such things. Pixel perfect displays and perfect digital signals have spoiled me. You're right about later CRTs, I've looked at several 2005 era Trinitrons and they all had awful geometry that couldn't even really be fixed in the service menu (horizontal bowing). The problem is that finding a good crt that is older than this is pretty hard- any consumer crt is going to have thousands of hours of tube use and has probably been knocked around a ton. Professional monitors are hard to find unless you're in specific regions (California).

I just have never had good luck with CRTs, but my 2013 Panasonic Plasma is simply jaw-dropping. I guess my overall point would be that it seems kind of arbitrary which things one chooses to focus on regarding quality, and so it makes one's choice of display pretty subjective (ie a matter of personal preference). You say 99% perfect geometry doesn't bother you, while I'm fine with 99% perfect black levels . So I would say it's a matter of taste. I'd definitely go for a Sony BVM or PVM if one ever popped up in my area, though. I definitely prefer plasma to lcd, no contest, but lcd gets the job done for me. OLED will make all these concerns a thing of the past

Scanlines are essential! everything else is preference. I know the AVS will have good looking scanlines, so it doesn't matter