Controls lag on HDTV?

[Tanegashima]

I took my Genesis out to play on my mom's 42'' Philips LCD HDTV over the thanksgiving weekend and I noticed a very significant delay in the controls. I played Sonic the Hedgehog and Gunstar Heroes and both showed lag when it came to the controls. This lag is non extant on my SDTV CRT and I was wondering what's wrong? I was using the DIN composite video for the Genesis 1 on the side AV port for the TV. Using the rear port made no difference either.

Any ideas?

[Joe Redifer]

HDTVs have lag, especially when they must upconvert from 480i. If it is an LCD, that exacerbates the problem even more to the point where it might be noticeable.

The only way to fix it is to play the Genesis on a standard CRT SDTV.

This is another reason I won't buy an LCD HDTV. I am still waiting for OLED or SED or whatever.

[j_factor]

Some HDTV's have a "game mode" option to fix (or at least lessen) this problem.

[Joe Redifer]

Which makes you wonder why it wouldn't be enabled at ALL times. It must sacrifice something.

[Flygon]

I never noticed lag when I used my Plasma. Weird.

[johnnyb]

I have stopped playing on my 42" LCD now, it has the `game mode` which does make an improvement but still lags, it also at random times changes the aspect ratio, one minute everything looks fine then it all becomes squashed and then changes back, I will be sticking to my good 10 year old tv for the sega!

[Mr. Ksoft]

I've never had a problem and I take the additional step of having the game console hooked up through a VCR which is hooked up to a 42" plasma TV. It's pretty much perfect this way.

And I once plugged my NES into my 19" LCD in another room and I didn't have control lag but was unable to use it because it blurred so badly.

[otaku]

old school games are best played on a good crt like my sony wega 27in however I do use a 57in crt at the moment that handles them pretty well (no lag that I've noticed) these tvs are also cheap to and have the best quality image for your money. They use tons of space though and seem to die within a decade (I use em alot hthough)

[Christuserloeser]

And I once plugged my NES into my 19" LCD in another room and I didn't have control lag but was unable to use it because it blurred so badly.

PC monitors don't upscale to the LCD's native resolution, that's why it looks so incredibly blurry.

The lag is caused by the de-interlacing process (and HDTVs think of the MD/G's 240p as 480i).

- The only way to avoid lag is feeding progressive signals (like the Dreamcast's VGA).

For anything 240p or 480i I recommend using old CRTs, like Joe wrote.

[JFLY]

I never noticed lag when I used my Plasma. Weird.
Same here. NES, Genesis, SNES, Saturn, and PSOne/Two games all run great on my plasma.

[Rassilon]

HDTVs have lag, especially when they must upconvert from 480i. If it is an LCD, that exacerbates the problem even more to the point where it might be noticeable.

The only way to fix it is to play the Genesis on a standard CRT SDTV.

This is another reason I won't buy an LCD HDTV. I am still waiting for OLED or SED or whatever.

Its not strictly the type of display that makes lag worse, but the processing.
ALL fixed pixel HDTVs (LCD, plasma, DLP, LCoS; basically any current TV) have to process any signal thats not at its native resolution.
Its more a matter of the specific scaler/processor in the TV.
Samsung TVs have one of the slowest video processors, and thus the worst lag when playing old consoles.

unfortunately, SED and OLED are also fixed pixel displays, so they may be susceptible to the same lag (the severity of which will depend on the speed of the processors used).

The "game mode" just turns off as much of the processing as possible to reduce lag (it still has to de-interlace and scale of course). the side effect is that the picture can look really bad.
I tested my genesis and neo-geo on several sets when i bought my TV, and the samsung game mode looked so bad it was unplayable. (i ended up with a sony, as the game mode didnt look as bad, and lag was less overall).
They cant leave the game mode on, as it would make all non-HD sources look terrible, and with just video the processing delay is a non-issue.

The only solution is to either play on an SD set (i recently picked up a 27" SD CRT just for my older consoles), or get an external video scaler (like the near-impossible to find in the US XRGB, or any number of nice but really expensive scalers that are available).

[The Sports Guy]

I dont think light guns work on LCD/Plasma either, I bought a brand new Lethal Enforcers with the Justifier for SCD and the screen flashed when i fired, but nothing was "hitting" or even marked on screen that I even shot. I think it might have something to do with the screen.

[Mr. Ksoft]

PC monitors don't upscale to the LCD's native resolution, that's why it looks so incredibly blurry.

The lag is caused by the de-interlacing process (and HDTVs think of the MD/G's 240p as 480i).

- The only way to avoid lag is feeding progressive signals (like the Dreamcast's VGA).

For anything 240p or 480i I recommend using old CRTs, like Joe wrote.

Well, actually it wasn't a computer monitor, but an LCD TV. Dunno how much difference that makes.
Additionally, I was in a hurry and didn't explain this blur I mentioned... it wasn't really blur in the traditional sense. I could see the sprites and playfield moving fine, but if a light colored sprite moved across a dark colored background, the light colored sprite would leave a short black trail wherever it moved that didn't go away for about half a second. It was really apparent, if I recall, in Zelda 2 while running around a town.

[evildragon]

Ahh, THAT's called response time. ;)

[Tanegashima]

Light Guns do NOT work on LCD tvs. LCD T.V.s do not have scan lines which light guns use to register hits...only CRTs use scan lines so the gun simply will not work.

[evildragon]

And as for the NES zapper, that's merely got to do with the latency problem.

Zapper detects white or black. White is hit, black is miss. Simple photo detector diode..

[Joe Redifer]

It has to know which "white" to detect if there are multiple targets onscreen.

[evildragon]

It has to know which "white" to detect if there are multiple targets onscreen.
Easy, if multiple targets, it strobes it as many targets on screen, and the NES must know when that photo diode was taken, which target was being displayed at the time, and weather it saw white or black..