NeoGeo AES+: SNK announces reissue of retro console without emulation
heise.de
heise.de
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost, 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
For light gun games, yeah, that timing might matter, but I'm not convinced it matters anywhere else.
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.
If you have an HDR TV, preferably OLED, and miss the CRT look, check out the RetroTink 4K https://www.retrotink.com/
That only worked because they expected to run over composite. Arcade cabinets used RGB which doesn't have the bandwidth limitations of composite.
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.
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.
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.
Displays are no longer the problem anymore, we're back to CRT speeds again.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I think I'll pass giving them a single cent.
Makes me feel a little conflicted having bought one of those SNK bundles a couple years ago on Steam or Humble Bundle or something. Don't love the idea of giving money to someone like that.
He won't get a cent when I play on my MVS carts on actual hardware, so there is that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Salman
Sigh.
It’s not. It sounds much more like a vanity or passion purchase. Like how Neil Young once invested in the Lionel model railroading manufacturer.
The biggest concern I have is accuracy. SNK wouldn't be able to just start manufacturing their old chip designs from the 90s again because a lot of the chips in the Neo Geo from other companies are no longer made, such as the 68000, Z80, and YM2610. This means that they'd have to make a new SoC that incorporates the IP from those chips. At that point there's no real benefit to the ASIC over an FPGA. It means the system costs less to produce, but if they find any inaccuracies in their new SoC design they won't be able to release an update to fix them. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'm not going to place a pre-order until they release more details about what exactly is going on under the hood.
If instead one want the real HW, a working MVS PCB can be found for less that €100. A JAMMA cabinet would be the perfect place to use it, but with a supergun a CRT TV can give the same results. Cheap superguns can be found or built for around €30, fancy models can cost between €200 to €300 tho.
The carts aren't cheap tho, specially if original. I've only a battered "Puzzle Bobble" cart, it's a really fun game in PvP, but probably not the more iconic NeoGeo title.