|
Post by Ex on Jul 11, 2021 22:35:18 GMT -5
I am very anti-latency, especially after trying in vain to beat Mike Tyson on an emulator with really bad input lag. I beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! back in August 2019, via Mesen on a laptop with an LCD monitor and a USB game pad. I don't recall having an issue with latency in doing so. Nothing so bad that I couldn't make Mike eat the mat. Surely thousands of other folks have beaten the game using emulators, so I don't feel special in having done so. Thus I don't think it's the emulation that introduces latency, so much as it is the display screen itself. Some LCD screens do have bad image refresh speed, and that will introduce a latency perception between when you hit the button, and when you see the character react on screen. But your emulator itself is unlikely to be the culprit. If it is, you're using a crappy emulator, or you've got your computer setup in an unoptimized fashion (typically loads of resource hungry background processes) and it's slowing the emulator down.
|
|
|
Post by anayo on Jul 12, 2021 8:52:44 GMT -5
I am very anti-latency, especially after trying in vain to beat Mike Tyson on an emulator with really bad input lag. I beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! back in August 2019, via Mesen on a laptop with an LCD monitor and a USB game pad. I don't recall having an issue with latency in doing so. Nothing so bad that I couldn't make Mike eat the mat. Surely thousands of other folks have beaten the game using emulators, so I don't feel special in having done so. Thus I don't think it's the emulation that introduces latency, so much as it is the display screen itself. Some LCD screens do have bad image refresh speed, and that will introduce a latency perception between when you hit the button, and when you see the character react on screen. But your emulator itself is unlikely to be the culprit. If it is, you're using a crappy emulator, or you've got your computer setup in an unoptimized fashion (typically loads of resource hungry background processes) and it's slowing the emulator down. To practice taking down Mike I was using Mednafen(?) on a Nintendo Wii with a Gamecube controller. My display was a CRT TV connected via RCA cables. I got really far but could never prevail. After grinding for almost 8 hours this way I switched to actual NES and won after a few attempts. Maybe that one particular Wii emulator just has really bad latency, but it made me way more concerned about input lag. Mike Tyson's Punch Out calls for much tighter timing than most titles, but it made me wary that input lag is there, even if it's hard to perceive.
|
|
|
Post by Ex on Jul 12, 2021 9:35:29 GMT -5
To practice taking down Mike I was using Mednafen(?) on a Nintendo Wii with a Gamecube controller. My display was a CRT TV connected via RCA cables. CRT is the display standard with the least amount of image latency, so the screen was no issue in your equation. I am not a fan of Mednafen, because I am not a fan of jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none emulation suites. I prefer to use emulators that specifically focus on a single platform, as they will be most optimized for that particular platform's emulation performance. I understand the concept of "cores", but there is still a top level interpreter utilizing those cores, and the interpreter is not specifically designed to maximize the performance of any specific core. So in this instance, you were using a non-specific emulation suite being rendered by way of non-ideal hardware (executing remote code through an OS wrapper, which adds processing delay, using a Wii, which is underpowered hardware compared to even a modest modern computer). As such, I don't think your method of emulation was as cyclically performance oriented as using say Mesen via a PC. An interesting experiment would have been, if you switched to using the Virtual Console version of Punch-Out!! on Wii. To contrast Nintendo's own emulation wrapper, versus the Mednafen wrapper's latency performance. My key takeaway here, is that emulation performance/latency is not uniform holistically. There are many different emulators, which can run on many different platforms, using a huge variety of processors/screen displays. So performance/latency will vary from approach to approach. Thus I don't think one should paint emulation with a broad "bad latency" brush because of this reason. I think if you had been running Mesen on a decent PC, and outputting the video to a CRT monitor, you would have had no issue knocking Mike down for the count. All of that said, using an FPGA approach such as MiSTer in tandem with a CRT, would be super ideal regarding latency. I will not argue that is anything less than the optimal approach towards that issue! There are however, limitations with the FPGA approach which limit ancillary functionality compared to more robust software emulators. That aspect doesn't matter though, if you just want to play the games first and foremost, with the absolute least amount of latency potential.
|
|
|
Post by Sarge on Jul 12, 2021 15:09:59 GMT -5
Yeah, there may be some extra latency on the Wii. I've always used Nestopia or Mesen on PC (and previously FCE Ultra), and I think most of my issue is display lag, not controller lag, although you can see from the charts that many controllers have different latencies themselves. But regardless, that fight is always going to suck if you're going on pure reaction time and not anticipation, which is how I beat it my first time with tons and tons of attempts emulating on an XBOX.
|
|
|
Post by Ex on Jul 23, 2021 11:59:09 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by anayo on Aug 20, 2021 6:23:03 GMT -5
What are FPGA's useful for aside from playing old games without software emulation? I read somewhere that FPGA's come in handy for simulating hardware that hasn't actually been fully designed and manufactured yet, but other than that I don't many applications that call for using an FPGA over a CPU.
|
|
|
Post by Ex on Aug 20, 2021 9:43:08 GMT -5
What are FPGA's useful for aside from playing old games without software emulation? I read somewhere that FPGA's come in handy for simulating hardware that hasn't actually been fully designed and manufactured yet, but other than that I don't many applications that call for using an FPGA over a CPU. Field-programmable gate arrays have many uses. Prototyping proposed circuit designs is a big one. They are also often used in tandem with CPLDs, to handle tasks which require high speed calculations due to FPGA's parallel computing advantages and their ability to optimize logic flow through minimal gate passageways. I have read of instances of large algorithmic software programs offloading data calculations to FPGAs then cycling the output back into the software for efficiency purposes (essentially treating the FPGA(s) like a subroutine calculation). I've also read of OEMs incorporating FPGAs into ancillary hardware, such as RAM modules, to handle data flow more quickly and efficiently. FPGAs are also great for circumstances where a producer needs a low volume of electronic devices produced, with the volume being too small for requisitioning custom CPLDs incorporated into the production.
|
|
|
Post by Sarge on Aug 20, 2021 22:15:42 GMT -5
While the other PlayStation core got shelved for now, FPGAZumSpass is on the case.
As for FPGAs, in most instances they're more a prototyping tool, or good for applications that need constant updates. That's why you see them used a lot in flash carts and the like as well. They're also good for parallel processing. They're not going to match an ASIC, though, which is what you'd move to if you have the economies of scale needed to produce a custom circuit. But an FPGA will help get you there. It's a little like interpreted vs. compiled languages on a PC in terms of speed: Python is better for rapid prototyping, but if you need more speed, you port it over to C/C++.
|
|
|
Post by paulofthewest on Aug 21, 2021 11:20:23 GMT -5
Ya mainly prototyping as we have mentioned. In the field there is debate of their usefulness. Their main advantage is they can re-arrange their circuit, so any particular type of processing that isn't already efficient in existing hardware, the FPGA could do better. Unfortunately, that list of circuitry is small. The other advantage is if your hardware has a security flaw you can re-arrange it without replacing all your hardware (or use a software fix.) For games, we don't have to replace our hardware when a new implementation of the 486 comes out.
I think all three of us are getting at the same thing.
|
|
|
Post by Ex on Sept 2, 2021 8:32:28 GMT -5
|
|