NES games have terrible play control / or my LCD TV lags

I recently played a whole bunch of NES games, and my take away was...wow, it is hard just to do basic things in MOST NES games...jump, run, punch. Most games, I'm dying quickly on level 1 because I couldn't time punching the enemy, or it was a short enemy that is essentially impossible to punch.

Castlevania works, because you have a big whip that can hit enemies long before they get to you, but other games, all you can do is punch like 8 pixels in front of you - and only if you're perfectly lined up.

I totally get the AVGN now. Try to play through most of these games without being frustrated.

I still love some of these games. But, I like the gameplay in more modern games better. I think they play test games more these days.

To be fair, most of those games were already considered awful back then. It's just that people prefer to remember the ones that did not do that crap.

This needs to be asked: Were you playing on a modern LCD/Plasma TV or an old CRT TV? It (ie: 2-6 frames of lag) makes a world of difference...

...so much so that I can't stand playing the NES/Turbo on an LCD.

I was playing on a new LCD flatscreen.

My only complaint is that my TV noticably sharpens the picture.

Do you think my TV has some kind of image latency?

Almost guaranteed.

Do you have a camcorder with a 60 fps mode? If so, try this test ROM on a PowerPak and put both the controller and the TV in frame, like this:


CRT: lag free; LCD: about 4 frames (83 ms)

You also suggested this in 2014...

No wonder....most likely the upscaling and/or image processing is adding quite a bit of latency making timing sensitive games very hard. This latency problem has been heavily documented on the internet. Putting the TV in game mode if it has one MIGHT help.

Are you playing via an emulator or an actual NES?

You can check and see if your TV's input lag has been tested and documented here...

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/input-lag

Actual NES.

I have 2 CRT TVs in storage. I don't use them because they have lousy image quality.

The "sharpness" control in the TV's picture menu controls a filter that amplifies high spatial frequencies. You should turn it down until you don't see white ringing around black lines on a gray background. The 240p test suite has a card for this.

While you're likely getting some degree of lag, I agree with your original thesis: there are tons and tons of old games with controls that are awkward, clumsy, or outright player hostile.

Sad as it is to say: fluid, smooth, playable games like SMB or Kirby or Mega Man were totally the exception, not the rule, on the NES.

I'm curious, to what games are you referring?

One game that surprised me in it's lack of quality was the NES port of Double Dragon. Granted, going back now, the Double Dragon games seem a little stiff anyway, but that aside, let's assume Double Dragon II is fine. I had a lot of fun playing it with my brother/cousins when I was a kid. My brother and I had Double Dragon for SMS and it was a solid port.

However, Double Dragon for the NES (perhaps more accurately titled Single Dragon, as only one person can play at a time) was pretty amazing for the fact that these successful arcade developers were unable to overcome basic hurdles in development for this console, and for one reason or another weren't willing to admit that and hire someone else to do the port.

And my "favorite" part has to be this, my vote for worst NES song ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ9QnXJJUu8

It starts out sub-mediocre, but just wait...

Might be worth trying said games on your CRT's if possible to see if the timing feels just as hard. Many LCD TV's will lag pretty badly when upscaling the NES video output.

Modern games have the same lag issue, they just take it into account.

Really if your timing window for success is so small that it can't accommodate a few frames of lag, it's poor design. People can't respond that fast. Eliminating lag is a small performance bonus for the player, but it shouldn't make or break the game.

e.g. I find Punch Out to be nearly unplayable on a CRT, and definitely unplayable on an LCD. Super Punch Out on the other hand I find completely fair on an LCD. It's just got a different design mentality that gives you enough lead time to react.

I've played a lot of NES games under lag conditions, though, and I'd say that there aren't many where I think it's a big issue. Punch Out is the one stand-out example I can think of. Even "hard" games like Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden tend to have adequate lead time in the game's design.

I actually like the second half a lot better. The sound is interesting, and not just loud blaring squares anymore, blends better as background music. Funny that this track doesn't seem to be based on any of the original arcade tracks either.

Batman, Ghosts and Goblins, Kickmaster, River City Ransom, Street Fighter 2010, Faxanadu, Zelda II, Wai Wai World.

(this is a short list, I was testing my PowerPak, and I did a quick play of about 50 games).

Either the walking, jumping mechanics were awkward, or enemies would pop up and I couldn't hit them fast enough (or at all, if they were too low to the ground), or it's like 2 hits and you're dead, and that happened several times almost immediately on level 1.

Because an LCD TV is the only thing I've ever been able to play Punch Out on, I cheated with a password and skipped straight to Mike Tyson, and I might as well have been blind folded... I'm pretty sure the reaction time you have is about equal to the latency with the TV, which means you're dead before you're even given a chance.

What even causes the latency anyway?


Because the NES has the best image quality? I'd use a CRT TV up until any device with an HDMI cord. I actually played F-Zero GX on a CRT vs. an HDTV, and maybe I'm just hallucinating, but I found it to play much better on the CRT. What's even really preventing an HDCRTTV from existing? Is it just that people are more concerned about the thickness of the TV, so something like an HDCRT would have been deemed obsolete?


One song I could never stand on the NES is the SMB3 airship theme, because I originally played it on the GBA and on the NES, the timing is off and it drives me crazy.


That game controls like total crap. I wouldn't use that as a test. I've never even heard of "Faxanadu" or "Wai Wai World" so I can't comment on that. Overall though, I find most SNES games to be better constructed.

1. Buffering. The image/signal gets stored for some amount of time before displaying.
2. The pixel takes time to change to the new colour.

In the case of composite upscaling, usually it records two full frames, and then has to upscale it for the monitor. Sometimes TVs have extra post-processing effects (colour / sharpness / etc.) which may be done in software, and might create a delay pipeline so these calculations can be done in stages rather than have to be fast enough to operate in a single frame. Some TVs have a "game mode" or "natural mode" that is lower latency because it cuts all the usual post-processing.

In the case of colour change time, CRT phosphors change brightness really fast compared to LCD pixels. e.g. You send the signal to turn from black to white and it begins a gradual (exponential?) shift to the new brightness. Early generations of LCD TVs were pretty bad for this, but it's gotten a lot better over time. I remember playing Prince of Persia on a laptop in the early 90s, and it was like I had a motion blur trail behind me.

TVs expect composite video to be 480i or 576i. Deinterlacing an interlaced signal needs some pretty heavy computation to figure out where each pixel should go, whether each part of the picture should use bob, weave, or a mixture of the two. Ideally, 240p would be all bob all the time, but most TV makers don't optimize for the nonstandard 240p signal of decades-old game consoles, given that everything since the Dreamcast has defaulted to 480i.

There exist external upscalers designed for 240p that produce a progressive signal (YPbPr, VGA, or HDMI) at 480p and up. An upscaler can be made with very minimal lag (see kev's Hi-Def NES), and TVs generally introduce less latency when fed a progressive signal. But some upscalers are better made than others, and the 240p test suite is designed to help evaluate them.


Early HDTVs were CRT. But yes, people were concerned about thickness and especially weight. And CRT HDTVs tended to show 1080i, not 720p or 1080p. And movie studios wanted to phase out use of component video in order to plug the analog hole.


Yes, the rhythm for that Holst-inspired track is glitchy. Its rhythm was corrected in the port to the Super NES. The animated series Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 redid the drum part for scenes showing Ludwig "Kooky" von Koopa's Airship, snapping the off-timing part to mostly simple prolation.

Hmm... That's a somewhat mixed bag. I never felt Batman unresponsive. Ghosts n Goblins is as it is. It's not always the most responsive, the game mechanics themselves add a lot of intentional difficulty, and the game runs very choppy. Kickmaster is just HARD. I've never got very far on this. It controls pretty well though; feels like the GI Joe games. River City Ransom feels a lot like Double Dragon II, which is kind of sluggish, but I think it works well for the game. I like the Beat 'em Up/RPG combination, like Goemon or Cowboy Kid. I think a good example of a Beat 'em Up on the NES that plays to the strengths of the console and feels more akin to a platformer is Mighty Final Fight. That one definitely controls smoothly. Street Fighter 2010 is another one of those, "it is as it is", I think. It's controls are weird, but they happen responsively. I have a soft spot for that game despite it's somewhat confusing design decisions. Faxanadu. I just know, "this is not enough golds". That's as far as I got.

Some of these games should be pretty fluid, I think.

There's also the famous NES level difficulty, if it's been a while. A lot of the games you mentioned are in the more difficult, even for NES category.


They do. They're just no longer manufactured. It would probably be the best format for watching your HD Muse Laserdiscs.


Hmmm... I always liked this one, but I also always preferred the villain songs in Disney movies. I'm unsure if that's typical. But, is the timing off, or is the "verse" 3 measures of 4/4 followed by one measure of 7/8? Everything else seems to be 4/4, so I can't help but feel it's intentional.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_wuD4Hao7E
Typically, I like a lot of things most people wouldn't consider music, like a lot of IDM or the Mort Aux Vaches releases, but this one didn't do it for me. I guess the rest of the song was lame enough that the "weird" part just seemed abrasive and not cool, for me. My buddy says they're tritones, note combinations which used to be banned, but I don't know much about note theory.

As a skilled Super Mario Kart player, I disagree. I get pilot-induced oscillation in SMK all the time when emulating on my laptop. Even Super Mario World is too loose. They aren't unplayable, but they are considerably harder and much less enjoyable. And yes, I own both games and got good at them on a real SNES+SDCRT.

I've also tried playing a sampled piano with a 20 ms ASIO buffer, and it's much harder to be musical when the note sounds that late (which is why, when I was putting together my own sampled piano, I added the option of chopping off the keystroke sound and just starting from the hammer strike). Fortunately the driver's latency can go much lower than that... but note that this is a scenario with no non-user-triggered events, that should be trivial to execute in pure feed-forward mode.

If 80 ms of lag doesn't break an action game for you, either it isn't very hard or you aren't very good at it. I can't even imagine trying to play F-Zero GX like that. There's nothing wrong with a game deliberately pushing the player's reflexes and fine motor control, and in that situation any extra lag should cause problems.

Oh wow it is based on an arcade track after all. How did I miss that one... Ha ha, so it's totally intentional. Cool.

No, tritones aren't something that are to be avoided, they're used all over the place in lots of music. There was an admonishment against them in some strict forms of 2-part counterpoint, but that situation really has nothing to do with this. Also the sounds you don't like in this track aren't using tritones anyway.

All three of the LCD TVs I've bought over the years had a "Game Mode" setting that reduced the lag to the point I couldn't notice it anymore. The first two didn't really need it, but the one I'm using currently is one of the fancy 120hz framerate-doubling ones, and it has an absolutely colossal amount of lag. I don't know exactly how much, but it's around the 200-300 ms mark.

Playing Sonic 3K on it without game mode is... interesting.

I don't find either of those games unenjoyable or significantly harder on typical TV lag conditions, but YMMV. Some situations are worse than others, and some TVs lag worse than others, but I will say that in both these games you get long windows of time to react to everything that's happening. You can see a turtle shell coming toward you. You can know when the next turn is coming. etc.

Not so with Punch Out, which has drastically short periods between indication and your required response. The question is whether the lag time is, say, 50% of the total time you have to react, or 5%, or 1%. If it's so tight that it's critical to the game, I think the game is designed poorly. There's no hard number here, there's just a point where it feels too short. If you have a laggier TV, the effect is worse, and at some point, sure it's just the TV's fault.


Musical instruments are very different from games, and extremely low latency is very important, I agree.


I don't know F-Zero GX specifically, but most racing games are somewhat resilient against lag, IMO. You know the track, and turns are telegraphed seconds in advance, usually. There may be random situations that arise, but you should have lead time to weave them into what you're doing.

Fine motor control isn't related to this; you can have fine motor control with high latency (playing a musical instrument, for example). This is only about reaction time, and I do think there is something wrong with a game if the primary avenue of difficulty is whether you can respond to a stimulus in a window that's comparable to 80 ms. That's simply not fun to me at all.

Lower lag widens the window to respond to anything, and it certainly is an advantage. If you're doing a speedrun, or somehow competing with someone else who is not using the same TV as you, it absolutely pays to use a CRT. My point is simply that it's not critical in most cases. I'm not saying that it doesn't matter, because it does matter, and it does feel and play better. My opinion, though, is that it is rarely so bad as to ruin the fun, and if it is it's generally the game's fault. (Certainly some TVs lag so bad that I would not fault the game, though.)

Since the Double Dragon soundtrack was brought up, though going a little off-topic (I've never tried playing my NES on an LCD yet, so I can't say much on that) I just have to say that it kinda sucks that Kazunaka Yamane only did 3 soundtracks on the NES, because those have IMHO some of the most memorable songs on system. The other 2 are Double Dragon 2 and Super Spike V'Ball.

I thought it really cool when I found this also, a Double Dragon remix album by the composer (at least AFAICT, it is):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOrODZZcIvE&list=PL6BoklkwiyPAHqU9CRmO0R6Y8E6SY9kKA&index=1
It did take the weird springy thing out of the end of the level 3 music. On the NES version I always thought that was kinda fun, also it's a little interesting that it actually does all that using the sweep registers. That's gotta be the most melodic use of the sweep register that I'm aware of, I was really pleased when I got that working correctly on my NSF player years ago.

Until you get to something like Parappa or Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero that straddles the line.


Unless it's something like Fire Field from the first F-Zero, on which a player cannot practice outside of Grand Prix mode.

RE:Tepples test ROM
My smartphone can record in slow motion...120 fps...I'm getting 8 (120 hz) frames of black and the 9th frame is white...

That translates to 4 frames @ 60 Hz. or 0.067 seconds of lag.


Mike Tyson gives you 12 frames to react to his fast punches, or 0.2 seconds. Human reaction time is 0.17-0.25 seconds (some people are faster than others)...so already...most of us wouldn't be able to react to Mike Tyson fast enough. Lose 4 frames to lag, and nobody can (8 frames is 0.13). Agreed, Mike Tyson is UNBEATABLE on an LCD (unless you're very very lucky).

And, NO, I don't seem to have a 'game mode' on that TV.

Guitar Hero was designed with latency in mind, and even has a calibration screen to time it for you, so, no that is not an exception at all. DDR, Parappa and Guitar Hero all have significant lead times; you aren't called upon to react instantly to random stimulus.

Playing a musical instrument always involves some amount of anticipation (muscles are slow, and your fingers or other human wobbly bits need to get moving ahead of time to physically start the sound). I've played organs with a big delay on the onset of the note, and playing a cello in time with percussion is notoriously tricky, for example. The more responsive your instrument, the easier it is to deal with the anticipation problem.

The real reason it's such a big deal with a computer musical instrument (i.e. software synthesizer) is that buffered lag is of an inconsistent length. There's no way for you to know when the next buffer will occur, so it jitters the timing on you, and that makes it impossible to play in any consistent rhythm. This problem doesn't exist in a rhythm game, where the position of the notes is regular and predetermined. TV lag isn't variable, you can cope with it the same way you would with a regular physical instrument. Significant lag is annoying but doesn't make the game impossible to play.


This isn't really about practice. You have one or two seconds of visual lead time on every turn (as well as a map). Plenty of advance warning to cope with reasonable lag.


Ah, that's neat. The "weird" part of the woods is all highly-inharmonic bells in this version? Hmm.


Yes, this exactly.

Ever try playing Donkey Kong Country Returns with major (100ms+) input lag? Or Dark Souls? (Hint: Dark Souls is less hard to deal with it.) I'd've sworn it was a whole quarter to half second...and I'm not finding online measurements of it.


But you don't know what CPU racers are necessarily going to do, you don't know how your performance is going to be slightly off this time and how you'll need to correct it...

And, of course, when you haven't yet attained mastery, you don't know the track either.

When human reaction time is "0.17-0.25s", each frame of input lag (@60Hz) is adding 7-10% to that, worse the better you are. Anything where you're reacting to feedback, input lag is making each cycle of adjust-and-check that much longer.

Of course, going from one accustomed value of input lag (effectively nil for a CRT) to another will also throw you off, because your reflexes aren't attuned to it.

Among the record-making, physics-breaking strategies are ones where you have to leave the track for (usu.) 1 frame.

I'm not really interested in arguing whether games break if you turn the lag high enough. Of course they do, and I've already said this. Why would I argue against this?


I'm also not interested in talking about whether low latency is critical for record attempts either. Of course it is, and again I've already acknowledged this. Equally pointless to argue here.

This is true too. When I was away at university I played F-Zero in emulation a bunch and got used to the lag (of course I was never as good as I had been on real hardware), and when I went back to the real thing I started Mute City I and immediately drove into a wall on the first 90-degree turn. I don't play F-Zero in emulation any more...

On the other hand, there's the case of Touhou. Some of the older Windows games lag on some computers, and a solution exists in the form of something called "vpatch". It has been opined that removing the lag is roughly equivalent to going down one difficulty level, and one player who was used to the lag remarked that using vpatch felt like cheating...