2600+ Paddle lag

[Redrum237]

Been having fun playing kaboom and breakout with the paddles. But sadly the lag is noticeable. I do have an Atari 2600 from back in the day and you can see and feel a difference when playing.

 

Im wondering if the lag is something that could be fixed in a future update?

[chad5200]

Lots of discussion around this topic in this thread:

 

 

 

[J2600]

Newbie here. But, my money would be on frame interpolation on your TV, which goes by various names like “True Motion” etc…

 

That causes a noticeable lag as the TV tries to create and insert sub-frames, making the image lag behind the controller considerably.

[Sean_1970]

17 hours ago, J2600 said:

Newbie here. But, my money would be on frame interpolation on your TV, which goes by various names like “True Motion” etc…

 

That causes a noticeable lag as the TV tries to create and insert sub-frames, making the image lag behind the controller considerably.

That’s a worthwhile point. Gane mode on my Sony OLED doesn’t disable “MotionFlow” or “Reality Creator” or whatever other nonsense, so I’ll turn those off and see if that makes a difference.

 

Update: nope, still jittery. I notice it’s more pronounced when you’re trying to do small movements and in a game like Breakout you need a wee bit of finesse sometimes…

Edited January 7 by Sean_1970

[J2600]

1 hour ago, Sean_1970 said:

That’s a worthwhile point. Gane mode on my Sony OLED doesn’t disable “MotionFlow” or “Reality Creator” or whatever other nonsense, so I’ll turn those off and see if that makes a difference.

 

Update: nope, still jittery. I notice it’s more pronounced when you’re trying to do small movements and in a game like Breakout you need a wee bit of finesse sometimes…

Worth a try. 

 

I was thinking from a lag standpoint, rather than jitter. Jitter sounds more like an A/D conversion or precision thing to me. If the 2600+ mainboard is noisy that could contribute also.

Edited January 7 by J2600

[Rocky714]

Jumping in here.  Just pulled out the 2600 to play with the kids visiting from out of town and to reminisce.  I noticed this effect as well and different controllers had this to different degrees.  I attributed this to different conditions of the pots in the paddles, they being quite old.  It's still kind of perplexing in that jitter is the more common manifestation but it's definitely lag in this case, not jitter.

 

-Rocky714

[Glorkbot]

the Atari 2600+ reads only about half the resolution of movement of the paddles as a real Atari 2600. So if you move the paddle just a little, it doesn't move onscreen at all. This can feel like "lag" as it doesn't move onscreen until you move a bit farther, but it's really something different going on. (There's a lot of video evidence in the thread linked on the 2nd post in this thread, but I've tested it too.)

 

Edited January 14 by Glorkbot