TL;DR Melee's original code has built in 20.83 MS of latency due to oversights from the development team. Faster Melee (what we use on Netplay) is a re-coding that has removed that internal latency, and the removal of this 20.83 MS can balance out the additional latency received from LCD monitors to replicate the pace and latency of CRT melee.
Phenomenal video, Hax. I've long been a supporter of CRT's for competitive melee, and strongly against monitors for competitive use. Up until now, the tech just hasn't been ready, and the experience has always suffered. This is what melee has needed to finally make LCD's viable. I completely agree with every point you made in this video, and I will do my part to help educate the masses.
not really. Faster Melee was developed entirely with netplay/dolphin in mind. Of course now, with that technology its not a big step for lans to switch to monitors though
hax you've always been my favorite player but I think you are also one of my favorite content creators now. the scope of your videos and their explanations are seriously impressive. you bring so much to the melee community and I just want to say I appreciate it.
3:15 my mind just blew. I never knew how exactly these monitors works and why everytime I tried to record a CRT it has those scan lines, really interesting
I've heard about people who practice on monitors for smash/speedrunning and are thrown off by crt when they need to play on it. It all depends on what you're accustomed to.
@@salj.5459 Most Americans do if you are talking about America. Study politics and economics can be boring but it is necessary to consider voting. My political views have completely flipped in the last few years because of this
Devyn Tucker What are your views now? And yes, I'm aware that the political state of America is absolute shit due to uneducated voters and corrupt politicians... and also apathy from young voters.
@@salj.5459 A little background: I'm a veteran of 6 years (Guard) so I've always been a constitutionalist even though I was a liberal. After listening to people and researching on my own, the best way I can explain my views is I'm now "Conservitarian" I am not traditional in my views however, but I am liberal when it comes to social stuff like gays getting married or if somebody wants to be transgender. I just don't like it when it's kids being chemically castrated. I believe in freedom of religion even if it's a religion I don't like. Basically the government just needs to stay out of everyone's lives more than they are now.
Jake Zepeda You do really suck (and so do I and most people here) but your muscle memory would be off and you probably will see better results by practicing on a CRT
Why would be netplay more consistent than CRT? If im not mistaken in netplay we suffer from the adapter polling rate not being synced as good as in a console setup, even tho we can now overclock it to 1000hz with Arte’s guide, he explains that at the end of it: twitter.com/SSBM_Arte/status/1313616578571837440
The change is inevitable, it's just a matter of when the technology and culture around the game are ready for it. The year is 20XX... CRTs are nowhere to be found. Optimal Melee is played strictly on monitors.
hax this is really top tier content you have done so much for the scene and i really appreciate your work ethic. Please continue doing this kind of stuff
this is the step to be taken in the community if we want melee to continue being played alongside other FGC tournaments. Youngn's don't own CRTs so it is harder for them to get into melee. CRTs are also a pain in the ass to transport.
Great video Aziz. You're the VSauce of Melee. Could you expand on the issues caused by codes that remove "too much" latency? What are the negatives to having the lowest latency possible?
From what i understand, the community is abhorrently against changing from the latency they've played on for ~18 years. If they change it, people who have acclimated to the previous latency will have to re-acclimate, which they don't want to do.
Those Wii2HDMI converters aren't where you want to be looking, the picture is crap and has gone through multiple unneeded conversions. Wii2HDMI conversion process: Digital Signal > Analog Signal > Digital Signal > HDMI Conversion > TV (according to badassconsoles). You want a solution based on gcvideo. For Gamecube you have Carby and EON, for Wii you have WiiDual. Otherwise, your analysis is spot on except possibly the BenQ RL2455HM vs CRT. I am not doubting that particular comparison, but it seems unfair that a 4 year old monitor has been used, there are other newer lagless monitors that should have been compared. I understand this was from a secondary source, it's a very minor nitpick. Thanks for your work.
Wii2HDMI is still far cheaper and a straightforward solution. Just buy a Sewell or Neoya brand which have the best performance with little delay according to Fizzi's own article. Obviously Wiidual and GCvideo are the superior choice but not everybody can afford over 100$ on those mods. This is where Wii2HDMI becomes handy for those with low budget.
I always thought the problem was the TV's own conversion of the signal; even if a flatscreen has analog inputs, it still has to convert those to digital. I understand that I'm wrong; I just didn't realize.
You're on the right track. The problem is what the TV does with the signal before it displays it, which is referred to as input lag. This input lag applies regardless if the source is digital or analog. Hax, as usual, misses the forest for the trees and fixates on millisecond display transition time deltas and technical differences in how the image is painted when input lag can introduce up to around 100ms of delay. TV's usually employ image processing to improve the quality of the displayed image. This processing pipeline adds additional delay and is separate from how long it takes the display to physically paint the frame. This is why fighting game tournaments use small PC monitors, which do not perform any additional image processing. There is a display database (displaylag.com/display-database/) that lists the measured input lag of popular displays, since this is not something the manufacturers publish. The displays used at major tournaments, such as the BenQ mentioned here, have less than 1 frame (16ms) of input lag. Ultimately, the actual delay is irrelevant so long as it's within reason, because what matters in a competitive setting is the reaction time delta between competitors. So long as everyone's using similar displays with
In the beginning where you compare the ways that CRT and LCD draw pictures it can be added that the fact that much of the picture is briefly black on a CRT happily results in moving objects and panning scenes being perceived by our eyes as much clearer, while the "sample-and-hold" method of LCD (as well as OLED) results in motion appearing blurry to our eyes (even if pixel response is near-instant), and this is known as persistence or eye-tracking blur (as opposed to "motion blur" from slow pixel response). Persistence blur on flat panels can be alleviated using techniques like black frame insertion. Luckily in the case of Melee there is not a lot of screen scrolling, but some players used to the motion clarity of CRT may still feel that moving objects appear blurry as a separate issue from input latency.
Great video Hax! But I need to know: Why do you find 20ms LESS latency a bad thing long-term for Melee? Does that much time difference negatively change how the game feels and responds for players at your tourney?
I'd guess it's just based on a relative difference from what we're used to. Just like latency added, latency removed changes timings that we are used to. The goal isn't to make it as fast as possible, it's to make it just like the better CRTs. FM was so successful because it's both the reduced internal latency and the added network latency that makes it feel like LAN.
Probably a consistency issue. At the top competitive level, I assume all setups (vanilla CRT and otherwise) should ideally behave the same. However I'm skeptical of whether even top players would be able to discern a ~5ms difference.
@@EvilApple567 the difference doesn't need to be discernible to have a statistical effect - e.g. see meleeitonme.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/powershield.png
@@jsoncpark They already don't considering they don't notice the polling drift. It's pretty crap that people are basing their arguments about latency off of anecdotes of players "feeling" the lag. Even more crap is how people don't understand that your latency will change any time you change setups and can even change on the same setup. You're never going to get consistent latency so may as well just reduce it as much as possible.
Been thinking running house tournaments again and going full-LCD would be a godsend for me since it's mostly a oneman team - going to try it out next time. Considering how Melee players despise change, thanks a ton for the breakdown and the bold suggestions:)
The PD is definitely something that should be standardized as long as we're already using codes like UCF (which is hopefully forever). From my understanding it would help the consistency of frame perfect inputs like multishines and pivots, and since the game is definitely headed in that direction there's no reason we shouldn't address that issue. I'm not as interested on the LCD issue honestly (because my scene has never had issues with CRTs), but anything to make the game more accessible and more convenient to organize and manage events is good in my book should it not disturb anything vital to the game.
I wish more informational videos were more like this: Only Narrator, visuals, and no distracting background noise or music in the background. Good stuff Hax. I prefer this style far more.
I still prefer the look of gen 6 and prior consoles on CRT TVs, but it's nice that people are finding ways to make it easier to hold these kind of tournaments.
I think I'm the Modern Melee world, we need to do our best to standardize play. I see comments on Twitter about how we should just stick to CRT cuz it's cheaper and more accessible, but at the same time there are people everywhere are still using different versions of melee, ucf on, ucf off, EON, monitor, adjusted latency, and whatever else. This video highlights that there are solutions to optimize the base game and I think that something everyone should think about the gameplay above all else, not just about how they don't want to give up CRTs.
I’m honestly all for this route tbh. I see the pros and cons, but I am inherently more aligned with this outcome for the future of this game in the long run if we decide in the end to go this direction.
The more a device utilises light projection as a method of data manipulation (be it decoding or transferral), the less latency will be generated by the given device as light moves at the fastest possible speed. The rate at which current moves through copper is likewise capped, although this cap is harder to reach in standard electrical devices for a myriad of reasons. Keeping in mind I'm speaking in gamer talk, it should be noted that the lack of lag in a CRT tv is caused by the "build order" or the decoding in data, which "rushes" the step in which the data is turned into light, but at the cost of having a low ceiling for fidelity (which is why the big switch to lcd happened in general). I could go into more depth but know that a smaller signal path = a smaller amount of delay and it is perceivable that smaller screens could lead to lower delay. Additionally you could cut open an already small screen and see if there's a bunch of excess wires you can shorten and go full mad max about it. This miniaturisation is funnily enough why graphics cards are getting smaller again fun fact lol.
I was randomly at Nebulous in March 2018 because of a school trip to NY all the way from Norway. I never knew I was at one of the last ones ever until now. Fuck.
I’ve been a proponent of LCD melee for a while, but never wanted it until they had consistent latency fixes. Now that i know this lets get it done. Never gonna lug around a CRT again.
Don't forget that running melee on a 120hz monitor and using black frame insertion could greatly improve visual fidelity and how long it takes the player to recognize the new frame.
I was trying to explain to my old head buddy how dumb he is for thinking he can only play on crt in person, this beautifully covers my gaps in understanding.
Looking at it from a broad point of view, I'm surprised no one has purposed a fix like this already. I'm not involved too much in the melee community, but this just seems like a simple idea of a solution (notice how I said idea. The execution is probably a lot more complicated, especially for making this the accepted norm for tournaments).
Before watching, I'm just gonna guess. A GCvideo solution plugging straight into the Digital Out port of an early to mid aged GameCube. (Thus requiring no Digital to Analog conversion.) And the kinds of monitors every other FGC gamers use because they're already state of the art when it comes to latency. ...Or at least that's how I'd do it. Hell, if you get a GCHD Mk. 2 you get a zero lag component break out for the stream right out of the box.
Huh. Melee has NTSC timing issues. Who knew! I still think GCvideo solutions should be a part of the modern Melee setup. And if we absolutely have to stick with the Wii (and it's slightly worse color depth), then the Wiidual mod might be attractive!
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say the VB + PD fix would reduce the delay by too much? Do you just mean that you think the goal should be to make the experience of playing on an LCD identical to playing vanilla melee on a CRT by matching the delay times of each, or is there some reason that minimizing the delay too much would negatively affect the game?
We started hosting S4 tournaments back in its heyday. We were thinking about Melee too along with 64(my personal favorite) but I advised against it because it was just not worth the time and energy to lug around CRTs. The cafe we did it at had one HD wii setup for melee and it was pretty cool.
18:11 i know you said that these codes could be easily be added to ucf memory cards but my question is how exactly do you go about doing that simply just for personal use?
Console's already "think in digital" the built in DAC turns it into analog but these wii adapters turn that analog back into digital "creating" this redundant latency. In the case of the gc, it already has a digital output. What about the wii dual mod that adds a digital out straight into the wii (in that case the monitor would need to support 480p through hdmi (unsure if 480i is rated for hdmi)). The wiihdmi adapter mentioned does upscale some of the time to 720p then the monitor upscales to it's native resolution, lag from two upscales and dedacing sounds harsher than one upscale from a digital port. Would be even worse if it was 480i as then the display or processor would need to de-interlace.
