UserError021 wrote:
So unless I'm misunderstanding, playing on a CRT with a NES or Analogue NT will always be the best in terms of input lag, because emulation will always be going against the current of modern hardware/operating systems...?
No, I wouldn't say so. Lots of PCs are completely capable of very low latency emulation and operation.
The most common problem is HDTVs, which tend to be designed with playing video (which, not being interactive, doesn't care about lag), so they have various delays while it processes the video (colour correction, motion interpolation, etc. they do all sorts of junk). A lot of TVs have a "game mode" specifically to turn off unnecessary processing and lower the delay, but sometimes the TV just isn't designed with games in mind (they're an afterthought). Also if you're using a composite input signal, it will typically interlace two 240p frames into a single 480i frame, halving the framerate and introducing delay while it buffers the signal for interlacing.
A CRT is always immediate display, but under the right conditions a PC can be effectively as good as this. PC monitors are designed to be used with computers (i.e. interactive devices) and often have very fast response. (There are good and bad monitors though, in this respect. Also: fullscreen or bust- windowed modes always introduce extra buffering.)
So I guess, yes, if you want to be sure, the CRT with a real device is hard to beat, but if you get a good collection of parts on a PC it's just as good, I think.
I think "output lag" would be a more accurately descriptive term than "input lag" for gaming setups, because the most common/prominent delay problem is on the output video, not the inputs coming in. (Audio is almost always significantly delayed on modern systems, much more than video, but for most games it isn't considered a problem until it gets relatively large.) Though you could say that a monitor's output lags from its input (the video signal it receives, not your gamepad input), that's probably the more accurate application of the term.