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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • True, but even that is higher than the latency was on the original systems on CRT. My previous comments were specific to display tech, but there’s more to it.

    Bear in mind I can’t pinpoint the specific issue for any given game but there are many.

    Modern displays, even the fastest ones have frame buffers for displaying color channels. That’s one link in the latency chain. Even if the output was otherwise equally fast as a CRT, this would cause more latency in 100% of cases, as CRT was an analogue technology with no buffers.

    Your GPU has a frame buffer that’s essentially never less than one frame, and often more.

    I mentioned TVs above re: post processing.

    Sometimes delays are added for synchronizing data between CPU and GPU in modern games, which can add delays.

    Older consoles were simpler and didn’t have shaders, frame buffers, or anything of that nature. In some cases the game’s display output would literally race the beam, altering display output mid-“frame.”

    Modern hardware is much more complex and despite the hardware being faster, the complexity in communication on the board (CPU, GPU, RAM) and with storage can contribute to perceived latency.

    Those are some examples I can think of. None of them alone would be that much latency, but in aggregate, it can add up.



  • I don’t understand all the technicals myself but it has to do with the way every pixel in an OLED is individually self-lit. Pixel transitions can be essentially instant, but due to the lack of any ghosting whatsoever, it can make low frame motion look very stilted.

    Also the inherent LCD latency thing is a myth, modern gaming monitors have little to no added latency even at 60hz, and at high refresh rates they are faster than 60hz crts

    That’s a misunderstanding. CRTs technically don’t have refresh rates, outside of the speed of the beam. Standards were settled on based on power frequencies, but CRTs were equally capable of 75, 80, 85, 120Hz, etc.

    The LCD latency has to do with input polling and timing based on display latency and polling rates. Also, there’s added latency from things like wireless controllers as well.

    The actual frame rate of the game isn’t necessarily relevant, as if you have a game at 60 Hz in a 120 Hz display and enable black frame insertion, you will have reduced input latency at 60 fps due to doubling the refresh rate on the display, increasing polling rate as it’s tied to frame timing. Black frame insertion or frame doubling doubles the frame, cutting input delay roughly in half (not quite that because of overhead, but hopefully you get the idea).

    This is why, for example, the Steam deck OLED has lower input latency than the original Steam Deck. It can run up to 90Hz instead of 60, and even at lowered Hz has reduced input latency.

    Also, regarding LCD, I was more referring to TVs since we’re talking about old games (I assumed consoles). Modern TVs have a lot of post process compared to monitors, and in a lot of cases there’s gonna be some delay because it’s not always possible to turn it all off. Lowest latency TVs I know are LG as low as 8 or 9ms, while Sony tends to be awful and between 20 and 40 ms even in “game mode” with processing disabled.


  • I hate that. I had my home built to spec a few years ago. The exterior siding is cedar shake stained a chocolatey brown with forest green trim, and the interior is white walls but with natural wood trim, pale golden laminate wood flooring, and two tone hickory wood cabinets, and the interior doors are all just natural wood unpainted.

    I’ve leaned into the wood aesthetic with my DIY standing desk and custom pine desktop stained a dark red oak color, among various other earth tone color hints, and splashes of brighter decoration here and there.

    Was going for “cozy cabin/cottage” and I think we nailed it. It’s very rustic.

    I really hate the modern trends of white, black, steel, and glass.


  • Couple things. Frame timing is critical and modern games aren’t programmed as close to the hardware as older games were.

    Second is the shift from CRT to modern displays. LCDs have inherent latency that is exacerbated by lower frame rates (again, related to frame timing).

    Lastly with the newest displays like OLED, because of the way the screen updates, lower frame rates can look really jerky. It’s why TVs have all that post processing and why there’s no “dumb” TVs anymore. Removing the post process improves input delay, but also removes everything that makes the image smoother, so higher frame rates are your only option there.




  • Disclaimer: Plexamp used to be great, but it’s stagnated badly. It was a good reason to buy plex pass at one point, though I don’t think it’s worth it now.

    I’m not familiar with Symfonium, but the major defining thing with plexamp is the DJ features for exploring your local music library.

    Unfortunately, some months back Tidal support was removed from Plexamp and that was kind of a deal breaker because now it’s only local library, and its “killer app” feature was using the DJ mixes in conjunction with Tidal to do real time mixes with your local and streaming music together.

    I’ve switched to using Lyrion instead, along with the Blissmix and “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins with LastFM support. It integrates with Tidal, Deezer, or Qobuz (and I think Spotify, but not sure, I only use hifi streaming services). They work similarly, and in some ways better because you have full control over Blissmix’s functionality for chroma, timbre, tempo, album and track repeats, and more. Also, Lyrion can stream directly over DLNA to a client, whereas Plexamp was just Airplay/Bluetooth/Google Cast (I have Apple stuff, but Airplay is terrible quality).

    It’s sad, but plexamp is just my “local download” player now on my phone for when I’m driving, since it downconverts flac to Opus at higher quality than MP3 and at smaller sizes.

    I highly recommend trying out Lyrion. I’ve used nearly everything for music in the past, including even having a year of Roon, but Lyrion has replaced pretty much everything.





  • I knew it was gonna be Audiobookshelf as soon as I saw the headline. Great software. My wife has all her books hosted on it on our NAS, and it barely takes any resources. I have it hosted alongside Plex in a VM on a teeny tiny Ryzen 5500u Mini-PC.


    Edit - I’m even more amused that I have almost the same configuration as the article author, Proxmox server hosting the guest, just mine’s an Ubuntu 24.04 server VM instead of LXC. That little server hosts Plex, Audiobookshelf, Lyrion, and AssetUPnP, pretty much handles all my media stuff, plus a separate Home Assistant VM, and has resources to spare.


  • You didn’t mention your budget. That will impact things.

    If you have a closet with a rack you have a lot of options, hardware-wise. If you’ll be running this in your living room, for sake of your sanity, something like an AMD mini-PC with a small NAS for additional hosted storage via NFS would probably be your best bet.

    A PC with Proxmox could do this handily. I have a cheap Ryzen 5500u mini PC hosting my Plex server, audiobookshelf, home assistant, and DLNA server (AssetUPnP). It’s only 6 core/12 thread and32GB RAM but still has resources to spare. You could totally do an 8c/16t one and throw more RAM at it.

    ——

    Edit - oh, and don’t forget that if you’re going to be hosting a public instance, you’ll need a good internet connection (with good up and down speed, generally fiber is good for that) and a public IP.


  • You can use ntfsfix on the drive to do a check and remove dirty bit. This isn’t a full check though, and could mask or hide actual issues with the drive if it’s failing.

    There’s also chkntfs which is more robust but I’m not sure if that’s open source and I’m not familiar with it.

    Using ntfsfix is a good quick fix in my experience, but at the end of the day, NTFS is a Microsoft exclusive format and shared disks should be mounted in a format that both OSes can use, like exFAT, or Btrfs with the WinBtrfs driver (the latter I’m not familiar with, I’ve always used exFAT for shared disks, but I don’t use Windows anymore).


  • It depends. I’m not saying I never pirate books. I’m not going to just support a publisher milking a book that should belong to the commons.

    Also, some publishers have taken to raising ebook prices to as high or higher than hardback costs. For those I might buy one book by an author and pirate another. I won’t justify it other than to say I only ever bought paperbacks anyway and still remember those being like $3.99 to $6.99, so I’m not paying $18+ for an ebook novel because of publisher greed.

    But if it’s an author I like, I buy their books, and support them in other ways (like with Sanderson’s Kickstarter for example).