It's too bad that people can't either just be helpful, or just stay out of it if they have nothing to contribute. I can't answer the question of Nebulas Ray PCB myself. I played stage 1 on mame for reference just now. I can't swear to it, but you might be describing a sensation from the ship's slow speed, the strange graphical effect of the background, and the fact that stage 1 has a lot of forced scrolling camera movement that makes it seem like you're 'fighting' the scrolling of the game. I don't know if this keeps up in later stages, but it's definitely something I noticed as I popped in a credit.
This was also tried with the low-latency setting available on the latest MAME builds (at least 216 and up). Switching that in the config file from 0 to 1 shaves off a frame, so it would feasibly be a little closer to PCB (though factor in my bog-standard LCD display and Windows 10, probably adding more delay than a PCB + CRT...).
shmupsrocks wrote:
I didn't realize it was a widespread problem on original hardware but it makes sense. Are there many shmups with 0 frames of lag on PCB?
There's no such thing as 0 lag, because there is at the least the act of pressing the button and sending that signal to the arcade board. The lowest that PCBs can achieve,
to my knowledge, is 2f of lag. But this isn't constant across games (BIL mentions Garegga, which runs natively with 4 frames). What you can notice or respond to is up to debate; as BIL mentions unless the game is really egregious you can 'plan' around it, and your brain will make adjustments subconsciously.
There is a red line though, imo. 7 or 8 frames is about my upper limit (generously so), but anything beyond that you'll definitely feel like the control is not as responsive as you want.