MAMEWorld Forums - News - Better than reality: New emulation tech lags less than original consoles

> > > it seems much more productive to me to try to understand and discuss the reasons
> > behind
> > > their growth, but that's just me, to each their own.
> >
> > We understand the reasons, they have complete opposite goals to MAME. It takes
> longer
> > to do things properly, so they are hoovering up users with their half baked
> > solutions. It's not the users fault, it's marketed in a way that makes it
> attractive.
>
> The other problem is they're Lance Armstronging it too. Doing it properly not only
> takes longer, it is also competing against things that are game specific hacks,
> basically cheating and creating unrealistic expectations in those cases meaning even
> when it does get done properly the proper implementation is likely to just be met
> with a negative response rather than the positive one it deserves.
>
> Was bad enough with the shmupmame crowd which also employed per-game hack techniques
> and created a similar mess.
>
> When you do start hacking things like that you're changing the games too, I know for
> a fact that some games had lag programmed in as part of the difficult balancing.
> Anything claiming 'better than reality' in cases like this is inherently a problem,
> it implies cheating, it implies game specific hacks, and it implies changing how the
> game are meant to play.
>
> I maintain, RA / LR is the worst thing to happen to emulation in the last decade and
> they keep adding more reasons to the list of why that is all the time.

Alright, this I can respect. Just calmly stating your reasoning so we can have a healthy discussion. Is that so hard?

This on the other hand...

> Go fuck yourself with a broom handle. [Not posted by Haze, btw]

Just makes you look bad and sound childish.

I have no interest in fighting over the internet, I think we're all adults here so I'll try to ignore it and try to stay on topic if you don't mind. I won't say anything more about RA in general I'll just try to talk about the runahead feature itself, if that's at all possible here...

> When you do start hacking things like that you're changing the games too, I know for
> a fact that some games had lag programmed in as part of the difficult balancing.
> Anything claiming 'better than reality' in cases like this is inherently a problem,
> it implies cheating, it implies game specific hacks, and it implies changing how the
> game are meant to play.

Even if things are "done properly" and an emulator has perfect timings you'll still be "changing how the games are meant to play", because you'll always end up with bigger latency than the original hardware, as your system's latency will stack with the latency from the emulated hardware. In that regard the end result is just as inaccurate as this new approach, just on the other direction.

I'm not saying that it isn't important to improve the emulation timings and accuracy as much as possible, but I don't see how the emulation itself is being tampered with in this case. It's just an inventive use of existing emulator features.

Whether the end result is more or less accurate than the original hardware, you can only be sure by testing the response times with a high speed camera. For people with laggier displays it could actually make input lag closer to the original hardware, and you can fine-tune the input lag reduction to make it as close to the original as possible. It's only for people with very responsive displays that it could be considered cheating, mostly people with CRTs.

Edited by iVoid (04/22/18 12:49 PM)
Edited by Mr. Do for clarification (04/22/18 5:15 PM)