Compare This! - Super Nintendo Vs. Retro Arch

This video was originally made just to show how quick the excellent Retro Arch is compared to a SNES hooked up to a CRT TV. I had always noticed that Super Mario Bros on the NES always felt a little snappier than Super Mario World on the SNES which led me to see exactly how quick real hardware actually is. Much to my surprise I found that most games on the SNES have 2 frames of output lag where as most on the NES have 1 frame. When I finally installed Retro Arch on my gaming computer which has a much lower latency monitor hooked to it Vs. my computer upstairs which is hooked up to a typical Vizio TV which has around 5 frames of input lag. The difference was noticeable, so I had to compare it for myself and found that Retro Arch was only lagging by 1 frame and my monitor lags about a half a frame. Overall the difference between real hardware and Retro Arch on a Windows machine is only felt when comparing the two, but nobody would be able to tell otherwise when not having a direct comparison. Then in the middle of making the video, Dwedit in the Libretro forums found a way to exploit the output lag that exists on real hardware by removing those frames in Retro Arch which effectively makes Retro Arch just as fast as real hardware on Windows systems and even FASTER than real hardware on Linux systems! So I also had to show that. The mention of the Super NT is not intended persuade those who have purchased one to get rid of it in favor of Retro Arch. It is mentioned to let those who don't have one know that Retro Arch can be a much better and cheaper option to buying a 200 dollar machine that can only play Super Nintendo games and still isn't perfect. If that makes you angry, you'll just have to deal. Software emulation is constantly improving and is the future. Software emulators were made by hobbiests with the aim of preserving history where as clone consoles and flash carts were made for profit. I respect anyone who can write an emulator and do so on their own time and their own time just to simply share it with the world.

[@harizotoh7]

Nice music from Assault Suit Valken! Kickin opening track.

[@Sr.D]

All this FPGA trend it's absurd, I would love emulation consoles capable of read cartridges with optimized and accurate emulators like Higan or Bsnes, Blastem, Mesen...they would be cheaper than FPGA clones and much more features rich having save states without the need of using an expensive flashcart. I still amuse myself when I usually compared my Megadrive with my cartridges and then go and try them on Blastem, just superb.

[@allankwashere]

if you are ever down to hook a brother up with links for good RetroArch discussions for info on how to fine tune the read ahead i would love you. im having trouble getting Rettro fine tuned. I play smw rom hacks and am looking into a analogue super nt and a SD2SNES unless i can figure this lag about. Maybe its in my head but thats why i wanna discuss. Thanks brotha. Thanks for being there when i youtubed lag comparison on these also. You the only one that wondered enough to make a vid for us nerds

[@OldsXCool]

Figuring out the run ahead value is pretty easy. It won't be the same for every game as some games on the SNES have as many as 4 frames of built in input lag. Most SNES games that I've played have atleast 2. The best way to find out how many frames each game has you should pause the EMULATION with the P key on your keyboard. Then hold some sort of an action button. While holding down the button advance frames one at a time using the K key on the keyboard. For example in this video I held down the jump button while pressing K and counted the frames that went by without Mario starting to jump. With no run ahead set Mario jumped on the 3rd frame which means 2 whole frames went by after the jump button had been pressed. So you plug in the number 2 on the run ahead settings and it skips those first 2 frames where nothing happens after input is received drastically reducing input lag. Now if you're not familiar with Retroarch and it's other latency combating features, you should adjust those first. You should go to the Video tab in the settings menu and turn on Hard GPU Sync. Then set Hard Gpu Sync Frames to 0. Alot of people don't know about this and this is one of the main reasons why Retroarch has such low input latency compared to the stand alone emulators. Mind you that you will need more than a potato to run with Hard GPU Sync on as it's not overly heavy for any Intel Core i3 CPU, but you'll wanna definitely avoid the Pentium 4s. The best of both worlds is if you combine turning on Hard GPU Sync and run ahead which is what I'm dong this this video. Lastly it should go without saying that you need to use the lowest latency display you can find because if you have a laggy display, a Super NT won't help take any of that away. My TV upstairs has about 5 frames of lag. My monitor on my gaming computer has less than 1 frame of lag.That makes a big diffence

[@TheSuperLumberjack]

Hello, Great video ! :-) Just a question : what are your video settings at 3:46 please ? Simple X3 with bilinear or something else ? Because it looks not bad ! :-P Thanks ! ;-)

[@OldsXCool]

Absolutely nothing. No scaling enhancements, no scanlines, no filtering of any kind. I like my graphics super crispy!

[@TheSuperLumberjack]

Thanks for your answer ! :-) So it's nearest neighbor by default I think :-P

[@JonasRosenven]

That was pretty interesting. Thanks for the upload.

[@OldsXCool]

You're welcome. Thanks for watching.

[@eplugplay8409]

Epic music.

[@mikeverzosa2061]

Why not use the same game

[@pliniomsann]

Retroarch is LIFE

[@pliniomsann]

This is the proof that RA can emulate even better than the real console or FPGA machines

[@zZiL341yRj736]

Yes but don't use the Higan core it adds an addition 1 frame of lag. Lol always wondered why I sucked at Donkey Kong Country 2 when playing it again. Now I know.

[@pliniomsann]

I don’t know this one… I always used the SnesX

[@theblowupdollsmusic]

This is a fantastic video, thank you for taking the time to showcase this as well as your other settings. I am an avid RetroArch supporter and latency reducer myself on Linux and Windows platforms. But you did not show run-ahead in motion. More then 1 frame and the image starts to become very jerky and shaky in regards to movement. As it is literally removing animation frames from the output. Also, USB polling can now be overclocked to around 1ms depending on the controller used. I love your passion for this subject as I share it as well. I personally went to MiSTer FPGA and have not looked back. They even have kernel the patched to overclock Bluetooth polling down to 1ms as well as an internal HDMI scaler with only around 4 scanlines of measurable lag compared to CRT.

[@OldsXCool]

The only 2 reasons why run ahead causes glitches is it is either set too high or the core being used doesn't play nice with run ahead. Even though run ahead is adjustable up to 6 frames, many games have only 1 to 3 frames of built in input latency. Some games like Megaman X on SNES have varying input latency depending on the input type as Megaman is known to jump after 2 frames and shoot after only 1 frame. What you would do in that situation is set run ahead to 1 frame so you don't end up cutting into actual frames of motion. When it comes to cores for run ahead, SNES9X works really nice with it and BSNES does not. BSNES even when set properly will still have a weird time warping issue that completely destroys the experience. When I made this video I thought that it was because my computer wasn't powerful enough to run BSNES with run ahead. It turns out that BSNES just doesn't play nice with run ahead. The Mister is already great and I know that Mister will get even greater though time as more cores for more systems are added and bugs are squashed. However I am looking for something more than what FPGA can offer right now and some things it either won't be able to do for a long time or never be able to do. I already own lots of games for real hardware and SD CRTs to play them on. Saturn emulation is very important to me because Saturn games are getting very expensive, my console is getting finicky for the games I do have, and getting a hold of a flash drive solution at this point is an act of futility because apparently the guy who invented it is a dick. FPGA won't be doing Saturn anytime soon. I like to play N64, PS1, and PSP on the go and all I need to have with me is my XBOX One controller that has a phone clip on it. It will be a very long time before FPGA gets to that level of portability if it ever does get there, and that's something that I want and have right now with software based emulation. MAME has always been amazing as well as low latency. I really don't care if MAME plays some games ever so slightly faster to the point where the only way you can tell is to run the real hardware against it to even be able to tell the relatively tiny difference. I've already played a massive amount of arcade games that I used to play back in the day and have discovered many new ones though MAME. Not only that but I have been able to play many of my favorite lightgun games on MAME ever since I discovered the Touchmote software enabling me to use a Wiimote as a lightgun in MAME. People are going insane over the Neo Geo core on the Mister while I've been playing the Metal Slugs on my PS2 and MAME for over a decade now! I think people's perceptions are clouding their judgement. Brain bias is a very real thing. That's why I did this video. As a former hardware purist I had to see the reality of just how much latency there actually is between emulation and real hardware because before I did I could swear that the latency felt a ton bigger than it actually turned out to be. There are plenty of people out there saying that they can feel one frame of latency to the point of doing terrible in games like Punch Out. That is brain bias all the way because a one frame difference ain't that big if it's even noticeable to begin with.

[@greventlv]

Thanks, i was looking for a video like this

[@HellLordBR]

Thanks, i was looking for a video like this, i'm using retroarch 1.7.2 here and i'm amazed.

[@OldsXCool]

You're welcome. Somebody has to spread the word. I couldn't believe my own eyes when I captured the footage!

[@VictorsGamer]

Superb! Song name plz?

[@OldsXCool]

It's the song from the first level of a game called Cybernator on the Super Nintendo.

[@boobio1]

Does look ahead work with ps1 and ps2 emulators?

[@OldsXCool]

boobio1 Retro Arch does not have a PS2 emulator core. I don't think it's workable with ps1 or N64 as it'd never worked for me since it slows games down to a crawl. To be honest I've not run into any game on ps1 that has any noticeable input lag. That's including games like Gradius Gaiden.

[@probe26]

yes!

[@kosmosyche]

It works well with Beetle PSX core, if you have a fast enough CPU. I use it to shave off 2 frames of latency in Rayman, Castlevania:SOTN and The Adventure of Lomax (all 3 games have 2 frames of inner lag) and I can't even begin to describe how much more responsive and pleasant these games are with RunAhead. To me RunAhead is the best emulation feature since Save States, maybe even more important. The only drawback that it needs a decent desktop-grade CPU, so it doesn't work that well on most Android devices like RPI.

[@piguy7287]

Do you think look ahead will be included in a future retropie release or will we have to wait for a more powerful pi to run it (pi 4?)

[@OldsXCool]

Brad Schuster Retro pie is not Retro Arch. Retro Arch has a program that runs on the pie called Lakka. However even though the run ahead feature is there, I don't know if the pie is powerful enough to use it.

[@mattmungrin4792]

Super Nt is a way cheaper alternative or am I missing something?

[@OldsXCool]

You're missing something considering that you can get a computer that costs just as much as the Super NT that can easily run the Super Nintendo cores. Not only that but you'll have a system that can also run NES, Game Boy Color, GBA, Sega Genesis along with Sega CD, 32x, Master System, and Game Gear, PC Engine, Playstation, N64, and Sega Saturn. Not to mention a plethora of arcade games. Add all that up. The Analog NT costs $450, the Super NT is $190, a Mega SG is $190 and still you can only play a small fraction of what an obsolete PC can play. PLUS you don't have to hack the computer or buy a $200 flash cart for each system for the computer in order to play ROMs if you don't already own the physical game. You don't need a computer nearly as powerful as the one I used in this video. This is my gaming PC which is massively outdated. You can spend half of what a Super NT costs for a PC that can play everything I mentioned above with no sweat. Yeah, you missed alot of somethings.

[@robertasm20]

@@OldsXCool You are silly. Computer which can emulate properly SNES (bsnes emulator) cost much more than SuperNT. Even CPU with clock ~3.0 GHz (required for cycle accuracy emulation of SNES) have approximately the same price as SuperNT. And you must also buy RAM, motheboard, hard drive. Of course you can run some shitty emulators even on ARM boards like Raspberry Pi… if you pleases playing SNES games with unstable 20 fps and frame dropps. And some games still not running at all. What you trying to compare? Shitty emulation on low-end hardware to near perfect recreation?

[@OldsXCool]

@@robertasm20 All I see from your post is that your English sucks and you don't know anything about computers or emulators. I can pick up a computer that will not only run games like Yoshi's Island using the BSNES accuracy core at full speed, but also play the Mednafen Saturn emulator at full speed with no frame drops for less the $100 on eBay right now. $75 with free shipping to be exact. That is complete with 8GB of RAM, a 250GB HDD with Windows 10, and a Core i3 4150 CPU ready to use computer. It uses Intel 4400 integrated Graphics which is plenty powerful for emulation 5th generation consoles and under so there is no need to get a GPU. Additionally Genesis emulators, even Blastem can run on a potato. Blastem has higher requirements than emulators like Kega Fusion and Genesis PLUS GX but still has very low requirements for any CPU made within the last 10 years. Additionally about BSNES, the accuracy core seriously emulates only a handful of games that don't run 100% accurately on the BSNES balanced core. Even the creator of BSNES/HIGAN Byuu has said so. Still on the computer that I mentioned above you can still run it all the time if you want to. When it comes to input latency which is what this video is about, you're looking at ONE extra frame caused by emulation and that is caused by USB polling which the Mister is also subject to as well. So what am I doing in this video? Comparing MY real hardware to MY computer running Retroarch. That is MY CRT, MY HANDS, MY CONTROLLER in this video. I don't need a Mister because I already have the gold standard.

[@user-rd5wj2mm8n]

Hi. Great video. Is it possible running SNES9X via a softmodded Wii I can get set-up so that the difference between this and running real hardware via a CRT is negligible?

[@OldsXCool]

I saw in the forums that they've now implemented this feature into the Wii version. You should be able to get it in the nightly build of Retro Arch.

[@Dwedit]

I tried it on a wii, the wii is just too slow to run Snes9x 2010 with runahead.

[@user-rd5wj2mm8n]

Dwedit seriously?

[@OldsXCool]

Robert Higgins Yes, seriously. You have to understand that console CPUs are very weak, even in the current generation consoles. Much less a Wii CPU.

[@deanzambardi2991]

Runs fine to me. I play nes snes genesis Sega CD neo geo and retroarch on wii. Need to add the others though.

[@mirabilis]

I don't have a computer. Super NT is the cheapest alternative.

[@gnaurai6251]

Your phone can run RetroArch, then you use a bluetooth controller.