> an intangible sense of "realness" that's difficult to attain with an emulator.
I wonder if this is due to input latency, because no matter how good the emulator, input devices have gotten waaay slower due to all of the layers in between, before even getting to the emulator... unfortunately it's not really something you can throw money at with modern computers.
> PowerBook G3 Pismo
I owned one of those, that thing is capable of frying an egg for real!
Personally: the lower the “action to result” latency, the more compelling and tactile something is.
We all know about the sub 100ms “golden zone”, but if something is ~10ms (custom hardware with optimized software) it’s significantly more real to me, and if something is <1ms it’s almost irresistible.
Like; 100ms is the barrier to entry and it goes up logarithmically from there.
Totally agree, ~100ms feels really subpar to me, but unfortunately seems to have become the status quo, most input devices seem to end up on the order of ~10s of ms usually closer to the 100 end by the time they affect pixels... every wired mouse i try on a modern machine and can whip from side to side and see the latency clearly, like a beat in my head, if the first beat is my hand movement, and I can clearly "hear" the second distinct beat of the computer responding, which means it's clearly perceptible... if you can perceive it in that extreme then it means it affect normal use more subtly, giving a comparably laggy feel that most people will never put their finger on.
From everything I've read it seems that this is just not going to be solved any time soon, because the latency is distributed across so many layers, each contributing a little more. Even going beyond the input bus the older computers are lower latency in terms of how long it takes for a pixel to move on the screen based on the new coordinate. It's a shame this isn't something that can be solved even in a niche way without making completely different hardware... I guess an FPGA could possibly come close, but only if you also abandoned USB input devices and had a custom (simpler) input bus.
I was so happy to see John Carmack leading the charge a few years ago, using Oculus to push for low-latency and high frame rate.
I think it’s because of him and others like him that we now have 240Hz displays, talk about OLED pixel responsiveness being much higher, and real industry progress around reducing the latency throughout the total pipeline.
I remember a time not that long ago when people were trying to argue that “the human eye sees at 60fps”. We’ve thankfully come a long way since then and I am hopeful for a future where we finally get lower latency than the old tech.
I wonder if this is due to input latency, because no matter how good the emulator, input devices have gotten waaay slower due to all of the layers in between, before even getting to the emulator... unfortunately it's not really something you can throw money at with modern computers.
> PowerBook G3 Pismo
I owned one of those, that thing is capable of frying an egg for real!