MiSTer FPGA Forum

I've been reading up on newer displays that implement backlight strobing and some other fun tricks to significantly reduce the effects of motion blur. I know CRTs are generally lauded for their laglessness and some users here won't accept anything other than a goose egg in their lag chain but most seem to be quite fine with just sub 1 frame. Personally, I prefer CRTs primarily because of their characteristically high motion resolution and think this is the most striking and important feature if you want to recreate the arcade experience. I'd happily dump (read: give to a loving home) my CRTs if I could get that effect on a low-latency display that doesn't weigh 50 pounds or have terrible geometry, especially because my end goal is to build an arcade cabinet and I don't want to figure out how to design a tate-able 2-foot-deep display mount (plus degaussing and potential RGB modding).

So, have any of you used/seen one of these displays? Are they even compatible with the MiSTer? What's the lag like?

It's abit of a rabbit hole very few displays do 60hz low persistence properly.

For 60hz input I would say the current cx line of oled bfi "motionpro on high" is the only thing that can do motion as good as a crt.
BUT you lose 75% brightness and inputlag hits 29ms.

for lcd monitors they either don't support a true 60hz single strobe (double strobing) or they do support it and the pixel response time is not fast enough and you get crosstalk which is pretty noticeable in retro 2d scrollers.

Alot of recent high refreshrate ips monitors are actually capable of zero crosstalk at 60hz because they have better pixel response times. BUT they refuse to support 60hz strobing because of flicker concerns. Mark over at blurbusters.com has been working with gaming monitor manufactures and has convinced a few to support 60hz single strobe. They are expected to come out next year. the primary advantage of a strobed lcd over a oled is brightness you can potentially do it with zero brightness penalty with a powerful backlight. many monitors today have very good 120hz modes but alas 60hz is not a priority.

If you want a sample of what a good strobed lcd can do try retroarch with bfi enabled and also enabled 120hz strobing on your monitor.

tldr I'm waiting on one of those 240hz+ ips monitors that supports singlestrobe 60hz
+ highest brightness
+ minmal added lag
+ no visible crosstalk
+ no geometry warping from bad crt geometry
- 60hz backlight flicker can be unbearable for some.

maybe look at pc crt's they usually have excellent geometry and sharpness they work well the misters scandoubler

Thanks for such a comprehensive write-up!

I'm actually using a PC CRT right now, haha. Only problem is that it's too small to look good in a cab. Thankfully I don't plan on building one until I've bought a home to put it in so I can wait with you. I just got really excited about the technology because it seems to do everything I love about CRTs. Here's to hoping the technology develops into a long-term solution to the growing scarcity of good CRTs (for all except lightguns).

Hi thanks, I was thinking about this too.

I used to own a 144 Hz monitor, on a Linux PC. I remember setting it to 120 Hz, so that I could insert a black frame in Retroarch emulator and enable the overdrive (or MBR or whatever).

The animation was looking extremely smooth and clear but it was flickering and destroying my eyes. That was expected I guess, then ?

But it seems the monitor was not capable of applying it to a 60 Hz input by itself.


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BTW, what would be the "ideal" monitor as of now, for our use ?

I wonder if a framedoubler would be difficult to implement (I say this as someone with laughably insufficient technical knowledge/skill) the same way we have a scandoubler, but for the HDMI framebuffer. I know the current fastest framebuffer only has about 4 scanlines of leeway and I don't know if that's too volatile to reduce to 2 or if the way the framebuffer is filled utilizes by necessity the entire time of the frame. I'm pretty sure most consoles have a vblank interval that's long enough to insert a black frame. It would be REALLY cool if you could push out 4 frames and insert a black frame into only 1 for reduced flicker on 240hz displays, especially if those displays become more cost-effective in the next 5 or so years.

Keep in mind this is just the mind vomit of a non-expert with no way of implementing any of this by himself (assuming it's even possible) and I'm certainly not so arrogant as to demand it of someone who could.

You would have to buffer a full frame for bfi and misters hdmi chip can't output 1080p120hz. 720p120hz is possible.