John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) “I love the @arcade_1up cabinets that @Project2501_117 has given me the last coup” — TopicDigg

I love the @arcade_1up cabinets that @Project2501_117 has given me the last couple years. Yes, you can run free emulators on almost any device, but having the games running in a cabinet with arcade controls is a much better experience, even though it is just a packaged emulator. I was pretty decent back in the day, but after playing these for a while, I got farther than young-John ever did. Recently I played an original Joust machine at @cidercade and on my second game, I blew away my previous best score at home — 158k! The subtle control latency of the emulated experience versus the real thing matters! I measured the press-to-flap latency at home, and it looks like about 80ms. It isn’t blatantly obvious, but it shows up in the game feel and control error rate. I know there is a hard core community around emulator optimization, and with high refresh rate monitors it is possible to get objectively lower latency than the original CRT based hardware, but there is no reason the popular consumer versions can’t get most of the way there. This is probably just a matter of backing up a triple buffered swap chain or extra layers of image scaling / UI compositor getting in the way. Phase sync to the last quarter or so of the video interval and swap to the actual display should cut that latency in half. Doing the bit plane graphics and scaling directly to /dev/fb0 with software would be a guaranteed low latency path if you can get vsync timing. Trivia: The real Joust, and all the classic Williams games, didn’t even page flip, they just drew straight to the frame buffer, paying attention to the scan time.