4/17/2026 at 7:01:16 PM
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.
by lamasery
4/17/2026 at 7:09:49 PM
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.
by tombert
4/17/2026 at 8:00:20 PM
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.by jamiek88
4/17/2026 at 8:42:08 PM
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.
by pipes
4/17/2026 at 9:11:23 PM
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.
by tombert
4/17/2026 at 10:58:33 PM
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.
by jamiek88
4/18/2026 at 12:18:37 AM
It's certainly worth trying the preemptive frames in RetroArch to see if you like it. Pretty low risk experiment.by tombert
4/17/2026 at 9:13:16 PM
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.
by chongli
4/17/2026 at 9:33:40 PM
>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.
by mrob
4/18/2026 at 4:37:35 AM
It draws one white rectangle per frame over each duck when you pull the trigger and checks if the Zapper can see itAlmost, but not quite. First it blanks the entire screen to solid black and uses that to calibrate the black level of the gun, then it draws a white rectangle over one duck on one frame, then a white rectangle over the other duck on the next frame.
The NES could use this information to determine where the gun was pointing by firing an interrupt at the exact moment when the zapper’s photodiode reached a threshold brightness level above black, and then only register a hit if that occurred while the game was drawing the white rectangle. I think in reality the game didn’t care that much about the timing, only that a rising edge occurred after the fully black frame but before the return to a normal colour frame.
Either way, an LCD doesn’t work because it can’t transition full black to full white within a one frame window. It sometimes works in the 2 duck mode, but it usually records a hit on the wrong duck. In any case, it requires black to white latency less than 16ms
by chongli
4/17/2026 at 10:47:09 PM
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.
by tombert
4/18/2026 at 2:49:05 AM
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 mechanical 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.
by chongli
4/17/2026 at 9:17:59 PM
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/
by corysama
4/17/2026 at 9:08:43 PM
>transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the HedgehogThat only worked because they expected to run over composite. Arcade cabinets used RGB which doesn't have the bandwidth limitations of composite.
by 7jjjjjjj
4/17/2026 at 8:45:31 PM
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.
by HerbManic
4/17/2026 at 7:06:14 PM
Metal Slug and Garou looked fine-ish with 25% scanlines on LCD screens and 50% on PC CRT's.by anthk
4/17/2026 at 7:35:00 PM
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.by tombert
4/17/2026 at 9:23:12 PM
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.
by anthk
4/17/2026 at 10:38:39 PM
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.
by tombert
4/17/2026 at 11:23:07 PM
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.by anthk
4/17/2026 at 8:20:32 PM
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.
by DiabloD3
4/18/2026 at 4:34:27 AM
Do you mind sharing which make & model that'd be?by moepstar
4/18/2026 at 5:59:35 PM
Asus ROG PG32UCDM3, uses a Samsung 4th gen QD-OLED internally.Its also the sibling model of the MSI MPG 322UR, and an upcoming unnamed Gigabyte model, so you have options if you want to get one.
Samsung sells their entire panel assembly (panel, polarizer and protection layer, carbon bonded heatsink, and unified controller assembly, but not the power supply) as one package deal, and all the monitors measure identically and have near identical feature sets.
I have mine setup to neuter HDR a bit in exchange for maximum contrast and no HDR thermal/power dimming.
* image -> HDR settings -> true black 500, not gaming or console (both peak at 1k)
* image -> HDR settings -> adjustable HDR (required for uniformed brightness)
* image -> uniform brightness on (this prevents SDR content from triggering ABL dimming)
* image -> vivid pixel: 0 (simple non-sharpening contrast enhancement)
* OLED care -> screen saver -> all three dimming controls: off (outer vignettes to prioritize super-brights in the middle, global dims entire screen to preserve super-brights, screen dims if nothing moves for awhile)
* system setup -> power setting -> performance mode
If you're on SDR, set sRGB Cal mode and don't touch anything else in Image or Color, and it hard sets brightness to 120 nits. It is perfectly calibrated for the sRGB whitepoint, sRGB primaries, and even correctly does the sRGB piecewise gamma instead of the incorrect 2.4. Couldn't ask for more.
Oh, and the best part? I cannot calibrate this with a colorimeter and improve it... I have finally discovered a monitor that can actually do its goddamned job accurately.
We finally live in the future.
by DiabloD3
4/17/2026 at 8:53:10 PM
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.by vunderba
4/18/2026 at 4:06:43 AM
Punch-out and High Speed are my two test-games. If I can’t land the multiball shot in high speed at the first opportunity, and I can’t at least get past the teleporting tiger dude in Punch Out, it needs more work.I’ve had initial attempts at an emulator set-up where I was losing lives on friggin’ Mario 1:1 though. Input and display latency so bad I was running into pits and stuff. Oof.
by lamasery
4/18/2026 at 5:53:52 AM
Ouch. I was pretty good at that game as a kid. A few years back, one of my friends got one of those NES Classic Minis which has Punchout on it, so I was pretty jazzed to give it shot.All of my timing was off, even Bald Bull was giving me a hard time. I was super pleased about that. Been a long time since I’ve felt that close to a gamer's equivalent of a redout thanks to the absurd amount of latency.
by vunderba
4/17/2026 at 9:50:27 PM
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).
by orbital-decay
4/17/2026 at 9:05:21 PM
>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.
by mrob