Been playing Fusion on mine last few days.  It's ok in direct light.  The front light helps it out a bit even in daylight and is necessary in other situations.

GBA SP was the one where it all really came together.

On a totally different subject: Atari console delayed until 2019. Quelle surprise.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/30/atari-vcs-pre-orders-start-may-30th/

mrsmr2 wrote:

Apart from the lack of a headphone socket.  I had a silly dongle thing on mine. Nintendo were obviously going through a phase of removing something important - GBA a visible screen, SP a headphone socket.

Obviously a lesson that today's Apple have taken to heart.

If this is close to reality it could be interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2II_FVEdQM

That's cooooolll

OSSC all the way I think davy. When I can justify it I'll be joining you.

Ok geeks.  Here's some stuff:

Been playing with Retroarch on the PC to reduce input lag.

I maxed the Retroarch settings for my CPU and used the 'see into the future' feature they added in the latest version.  I set this to two frames as that is the natural input lag for most SNES games.

I filmed the screen and the controller at 250fps so I could count the number of frames between the button press and reaction on screen.
250fps means each frame is 4ms.

Results:
Super Metroid, max settings connected to monitor - 12 camera 'frame' advances = 48ms = 2.9 frames (a frame at 60fps = 16.6ms)
Mario All Stars: SMB, US Snes connected to CRT - 13 camera 'frame' advances = 52ms = 3 frames

To sense check my calculations:
a) turned off the 'see into the future' feature so this should add 2 frames of lag.  That's 33ms.  Under filimg I counted 20 key pressess which is 8 more than before, 8 frames = 32ms.  So that confirms that.
b) each game frame lasts 16.6ms on screen so at 250fps, that game frame should repeat 4 times on the camera.  And it did.

So that means, for SNES games, PC Retroarch gives the same input lag as the console.  Fuck me!

It doesn't have the smooth scrolling of the CRT but it's perfect otherwise.

Other tests:
- I also did a quick test to see if there was any latency difference between a wired DS4 and a wireless 360 controller.  Both seemed to give the same result.  That's pretty impressive for a wireless controller.
- RetroPie with default Retroarch settings had an input lag of 6.7 frames.  That can be improved as a few other settings can be tweaked.

Notes:
frame counts won't be totally accurate as it's difficult to know when the button activates.  However, I started counting a few frames before my thumb reach the end of the press, and did this consistently across the tests.
Mario All Stars has the same 2 frames of lag as Super Metroid so the test should be comparable.  I can test SMB on Retroarch but I don't expect I will get any different results.

Snes mini is meant to be good.  It has its own emulator 'Canoe' which is fast.  Not as fast as the PC, maybe 1 - 2 frames behind.  It doesn't support all SNES games though so it's not a direct replacement for Retroarch.

My next test is to lug the PC into the lounge and test it on the plasma, which is supposed to have 28ms of input lag.

Then I'm going to try Steam Link, which will be worst case - Steam Link and TV latency combined.  I expect that to be 6 frames of lag as the Steam Link reports around 15/16ms of lag when running.  But that's still faster than the default RetroPie settings (which in turn would be even worse if I plugged it into the plasma directly).

I thought 28 was crap - for a plasma.  It's double the previous version of my tv.

Ta but not sure what the connection is between monitors and my plasma.

Monitors should be low as they don't have to do anything.  TVs (LCDs especially) are worse because they have to apply additional processing.
Plasmas should be in between - for example display refresh is a lot faster than LCDs (including LCD monitors) but they will still have some signal processing to slow things down.

Metroid Fusion on GBA SP is 3 frames.

Tested with PC connected directly to plasma.  Because it's not possible to know when the button activates, it's very difficult to know when to start counting so testing at 4ms intervals is open to error.

I counted between 16 and 32ms, with most being in the 24ms range.  Therefore, 28ms as I've read in the past seems about right - and it stacks up with the Steam Link test.

Summary:
PC on monitor = 3 frames
PC on plasma = 4.5 frames
PC on plasma with steam link = 5.5 frames.

5.5 is still better than most modern games.

For a laugh I'm going to try Monster Hunter World on PS4.  That'll be counted in seconds rather than ms, lol.

OSSC does scanline processing. 0 frame delay. sub ms delay at any rate.

Do modern TVs still have game modes?

Someone's being an ace person and searched for a Micro and Panel De Pon while in Japan!

Loving it, I think Panel De Pon might be my favourite puzzle game, together with Tetris. It plays great on the Micro too. Now I just need to find or make a small case /pouch so I can easily carry it everywhere.

Now the actual game collecting can begin, met someone at a retro game swap a few weeks ago who occasionally has Japanese GBA games, hopefully he'll have a Kuru Kuru Kururin at some point. That plus Wario Ware will be my Japanese trio I think, should be easy to play without being able to read the text.