@koda9901 Very cool idea!

@thelostsoul I know, but without you I wouldn't be aware of it. :)

@Brunnis Hello Brunnis, I am glad you had a quick look at my results. I have high respect for your work.

I know something must went wrong on my test, as the outcome wasn't consistent and I didn't know the actual delay for input and output devices or even used wrong emulator settings. I expected some sort of delay and just wanted to know how my personal setup works. Currently, there the only way to play on CRT for me is to use that converter.

Quick test of GAMEPAD and CONVERTER

I did a quick test on my USB Fightstick on my PC without RetroPie.

Test 1 does not involve any display. It was just to see how long the LED light on the stick needs to turn on after pressing a button. This is hard to tell, as I can't say for 100% sure when the actual press of button sends a signal. At least the converter, monitor and usb aren't involved here.
Result: 1 or 2 frames of 240 fps, which translates to 0.25 to 0.5 frames at 60 fps (right?).

For Test 2 I used my daily Linux PC with 144 Hz HDMI monitor (without converter). jstest-gtk on Ubuntu was used to visualize a press button on display.
Result: I think 4 frames of 240 fps footage in addition after the LED is lighting up. That translates to 1 frame delay at 60 fps.

At Test 3 I connected same PC to the CRT PC monitor via HDMI to VGA converter. Same jstest-gtk was used as previous test.
Result: 6 or 7 frames at 240 fps footage after the LED is lighting up. Which translates to about 1.5 or 1.75 frames at 60 fps.

Conclusion:

The arcade stick seems to add 1 or 1.5 frame delay on its own, which would mean 16.7ms or 25ms. If Test 2 and 3 are compared, the converter seems to add 1.5 or 1.75 frame delay on its own, which would mean 25ms or 29.2 ms. So, both together are in total adding up approx. about 3 frames or 50 ms latency.

Do you think the autofire/turbo-2 function of arcade stick could send too many key press events, so the emulator or driver gets too busy? Could this have an effect? What do you think about all of this? Does these sound reasonable?

And, should I also just copy the posting to Reddit?

I agree and I have made a new topic on the sort, but we aren't the first ones to talk about this.

Hi @JoseyWales ! I just made a thread about this as well and came across yours as I was tagging mine.

I have the Kodi working well with my 8bitdo controller but I am a now looking for a solution for PDFs and CBZ comic books. My thinking is for manuals, guides, tie-in comics for games, even maps!

I have come across a few possibilities concerning Kodi add-ons but they are not likely to be great to use with a game controller on a TV screen so I am looking to see if anyone has done this already. I had requested long ago that we get a wiki-viewer for RetroPie and one was sorted out via lynx/curses/etc but PDFs/epubs/mobi/CBZs will not be renderable in curses/the terminal.

1 - Images in Kodi. Kodi lets you view pictures and you could order each page/sheet into their own folders and view them like that. I need to test the zooming from a controller on a TV screen
2 - Kodi addons for ebooks and PDF files. There are a number of these but I have to test them out as well.
3 - Video conversion - This is a radical idea, but instead of trying to get the PDF/epub/cbz/mobi/etc formats to work properly with zoom and a controller and such, we could instead try to do it by converting these files to VIDEOS! You could then play them in Kodi and have them setup in such a way that they they are zoomed in properly and so forth. They would obviously be pause-able and rather than try and get the RetroPie to conform to what we need, we convert the files to something that the RetroPie would be able to handle better. This is technically the most complicated way but I think it is possible for me to write a script for Mac OS X machines to convert them.

Had a go myself for my full SNES set-up - best I could do in Word...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9389059/Manual.pdf