Best settings for reducing controller lag? I'm at my wits end.

edmaul69

@TooBeaucoup are you using usb extension cables? They can create input lag as well.

edmaul69

@mediamogul i absolutely hate feeling like im watching days of our lives/ home videos. I cant get used to this new crap. All 3 of my personal tvs are older ones that dont have this crap. My 50" is a plasma so as long as i can fix any electrical problem that might come up i should hopefully be good for a while. 100,000 hours is a really, really long time.

TooBeaucoup

@edmaul69 said in Best settings for reducing controller lag? I'm at my wits end.:

@TooBeaucoup are you using usb extension cables? They can create input lag as well.

No, no extension cables, controller goes straight into the Pi and running about a 1 meter HDMI cable. I get the same crap on multiple TVs. I'm sure I just have to mess around with settings or something.

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Best settings for reducing controller lag? I'm at my wits end.:

are you using usb extension cables? They can create input lag as well.

USB 2 cables begin to cause problems at a little over 16 feet, but even then they actually don't create any lag. Instead, the signal begins to degrade and there's a chance that the input will not be received at all.

@TooBeaucoup

Hah! I just noticed your name... Braggart.

edmaul69

@mediamogul i have some cheapo genesis and nes controllers that when on a 6 foot usb extension cable they have so much lag that mario bros is unplayable. And this is with thick usb extension cables. The cables on the controllers not so good. I know most controllers arent that bad but these ones are. I have never used an ibuffalo so i dont know anything about them.

Rion

@edmaul69 Have you tried to increase the the usb max current in /boot/config.txt?

Setting max_usb_current=1 sets the available current over USB to 1.2A (default is 600mA)

I know it's a Longshot but it could help..

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Best settings for reducing controller lag? I'm at my wits end.:

when on a 6 foot usb extension cable they have so much lag that mario bros is unplayable.

Six feet should be way too too short to cause an issue, but you can't argue with real world results. I know you have quite a controller/adapter collection. Is it just those particular genesis and nes controllers that lag in conjunction with the extensions or is it everywhere?

edmaul69

@Rion i wasnt even aware of that. I will have to try it if i ever have the problem again.

@mediamogul yeah i dont use those controllers now. They were what we were originally trying to use on the nes when i made the front controller ports adapt to usb. But yeah they were the only ones with issues. But the nes ports are on an nes to usb adapter now and i wired up some snes extension cables with nes connectors on the end so i could use them on the nes ports as well.

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Very keen!

UDb23

@mediamogul I got usb extenders too ( 1,5 m amazon basics) and still no lag.

mediamogul

@UDb23

I use those same ones and they've treated me very well. At first I was a little put off by how thick they were, but it's really want you want in a quality extension cable. They were a great buy.

TooBeaucoup

I'd like to thank everyone for your suggestions. Although, I haven't fully solved it, I think it's just a tinge better now and I'm gonna keep crackin' at it. This community is truly full of some of the nicest and most helpful people.

PetroRie

I'm using an USB cable of 7 meter, which is 22,9659 foot (Google lol) never had any input lag at all. Works fine with my keyboard and my PS4 controller.

iosman123

@TooBeaucoup said in Best settings for reducing controller lag? I'm at my wits end.:

I'm just curious if there's a thread or faq for some typically used settings for reducing controller input lag? I know that with any kind of emulation there's going to be some kind of lag, but damn, I just built my Pi to play retro games and I'm pretty astonished how noticeable my lag is. Every Mario game I try and play is pretty much impossible, due to having to push the jump button at, what feels like, a full second before I want to jump. The same thing goes for controlling Mario, he's awful and sluggish in every game I've tried. It seems like a lot of my shoot-em-up games suffer this same fate as well. I've Googled and searched these forums, but there's so many different threads and areas of the site and sooooo many options within the emulator menus that it can be pretty daunting trying to figure this out.

I'm not a stickler about input lag either. I've never seemed to have any trouble on any of my PCs over the last 10+ years when I've played emulators. I was so excited to finally finish my Pi, but damn, any platformer or shooter that I try is pretty much unplayable. I've tried what, I think, seem to be the typical things, enable hard sync, disable multithreaded video, set frame delay (Which only seems to make my games run choppier once you turn it up past the first few notches), etc... I just read that you should run Dispmanx for your video driver and I think that seems to help, although, that could just be a placebo from me reading that it helps. I'm just wondering if there's any other obvious tweaks or settings I'm missing. I find it hard to believe that gamers who build these think this would be acceptable lag, because like I said, lag has never bothered me, but this is making most of my games unbearable to play. This is affecting my NES and SNES games.

I apologize if there's some big, universal thread for this, but I couldn't seem to find much. ~~https://tweakboxx-app.com https://tweakbox-app.net https://tweakboxx.net~~ did find a couple threads, but there was SO MUCH info contained within that I was just kind of lost as to what I should even attempt to change, as far as settings are concerned.

I'm running a Pi Zero v1.3 with the latest version of RetroPi installed, I've tried every SNES emulator that comes with RetroPi and they all seem to have the issue and I'm using a Buffalo Classic USB SNES gamepad, which works terrific with emulators on my PC.

Forgive me if I'm missing an obvious thread, but my search results didn't seem to yield a whole lot other than a couple threads that were just ballooned with tons of different info, tests and lines of code tweaking that it was making my head spin.

thanks my issue has been fixed and I'm not an expert in lag matters but it may depend also from actual Pi hardware you're using. I got a Pi 3 with different controllers (all wired) including the Buffalo classic; I didn't find any noticeable lag.