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Comment by greenn | Hacker News Reader

In the Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive scene we still use CRTs for in-person tournaments because of the input lag on LCDs. Most original hardware available to play the game doesn't have a digital display output unless you have an early model GameCube and purchase a ~$100 HDMI adapter. Even if you get the hardware setup for modern digital output, most LCD monitors still have poor response times without spending the extra money for a "gaming" monitor.

There has been a lot of work by modders to reduce the input lag introduced by the game engine itself to offset the lag introduced by LCD monitors, but I hope someday LCDs can catch up in this last metric.

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I can't think of anything else than some arcade games requiring the lowest possible latency. People are okay with 50 ping games so 2 ms really doesn't matter to most players.

Tech skill by good players in smash is pretty incredible. Online is a noticably different game than in person from the minimal online lag.

The traditional way to play melee is local multiplayer only, so players most players are used to the incredibly fast response of a CRT. This and the muscle memory required to play at a high level makes LCD monitors (and especially TV's) noticeable.

50ms network latency is not the same thing as 50ms controller to display latency.

If your network latency is 50ms, you still have extremely low, almost zero latency for most operations like using the mouse to change the look direction.

50ms display latency would make a modern FPS utterly unplayable.

Games like SSB are extremely latency dependent.

My point is, it is not worth to change the whole lcd technology just for games like ssb. Which is probably 1ms latency for lcd is enough.

It's not just SSB. There are entire classes of games that aren't playable even at novice levels on modern LEDs like Guitar Hero style rhythm games.

LEDs often have much higher latency than necessary. Many have ALLM modes which disable certain features to decrease latency. We already have changed LED technology for this reason -- higher end computer monitors specifically focus on latency now. It's a really big deal.

LCDs may refresh pixels at a rate of 1ms, that does not mean the pixel displayed is only 1ms away from the input. You can get maybe 10ms of input lag with the very best setups. Modern TVs easily have 100ms of lag out of the box due to processing which you may or may not be able to bypass.

> it is not worth to change the whole lcd technology just for games

Nobody suggested this. {Parent} was merely pointing out one advantage of CRT tech over LCD tech in a specific use case.

> work by modders to reduce the input lag introduced by the game engine itself

Can you link something about this? are people rewriting the core engine of melee?

There's a phenomenon known as Polling Drift where the 2x-per-frame input polling at 120 Hz is mismatched with the NTSC framerate that's 0.1% slower, leading to a variable 0-0.5 frame input lag. This can be patched out.

Additionally, they found that there is an extra frame of buffer hanging around that wasn't necessary so that can be removed.

There might be something else too?

Another HN user mentioned a skipped frame every 20 seconds on a Dell monitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582085

That sounds weird to me. Old game consoles with analog video output didn't generate perfect NTSC or PAL timings (for example, the Megadrive would actually run at 59.92274 Hz in NTSC, and 49.701459 Hz in PAL), but it didn't matter as the CRT TVs had some wiggle room and would synchronize to the video signal. There was no such thing as input and output running at different rates and desynchronizing.

The problem isn't that the framerate isn't exactly the right frequency, it's that the controller polling frequency is not a whole multiple of the framerate.

The game uses the last poll, but the last poll could be up to half a frame old.

A few projects that are pretty widely used in the Melee scene are 20XXTE [0] and Slippi [1].

As far as I know, neither rewrite the core engine of melee, but there are some key modifications like UCF (Universal Controller Fix) in 20XXTE that modifies the way the game interprets analog stick movement to help standardize the effectiveness of gamecube controllers. Without that fix, it's very hit or miss on whether or not certain movement tech would work consistently on a controller due to joystick drift / deadzones.

[0] - https://github.com/dansalvato/20XXTE

[1] - https://github.com/project-slippi/project-slippi

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