With the Switch 2 coming out, I was curious if either the game was fixed or if the additional CPU power (a single A78C on Switch 2, AFAIK, is about as fast as all four A57s on Switch 1) would resolve things on its own.
I didn't have the Tribute collection but the games are on sale at the moment so I picked up Cotton Boomerang by itself. (Also bought it on Steam but that's neither here nor there)
So I did a quick and dirty latency test across a few different options.
- Haute GP2040 controller, which gets sub-1ms latency on MiSTer tests
- iPhone on 240fps slow-motion (which is a PITA to properly load in video editors)
- Controller LED lights up on press so I sync'd up on that, and used a change in a menu option (controller, from "Command" to "Rapid") to gauge press-to-update latency
Test platforms were:
- Switch 1, Switch 2, both over direct USB to the controller
- Sega Saturn with a RADV HDMI adapter on a cheap Amazon OLED screen
- MiSTer on a CRT (which looks awful in slow motion, sadly)
And the results: https://imgur.com/9iWSJjn
At a glance in potplayer (couldn't get ms in VLC), LED lights up at 0.231, CRT/MiSTer at 0.628, Saturn/OLED at 0.708, Switch 1 at 0.962, Switch 2 at 1.070
Or assuming 1/8th speed, and assuming the LED lights up at 28ms, that's MiSTer at 50ms, Saturn/OLED at 60ms, Switch 1 at 92ms, Switch 2 at 105ms.
Or as a handy chart with conversion to frames:
| Cotton Boomerang Lag Comparison | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Lag (frames) |
Added Lag (frames) | |||||||||||||||||
| MiSTer + CRT | 3.0 |
0.0 |
|||||||||||||||||
| Saturn + OLED | 3.6 |
0.6 |
|||||||||||||||||
| Switch 1 | 5.5 |
2.5 |
|||||||||||||||||
| Switch 2 | 6.3 |
3.3 |
|||||||||||||||||
2-3 frames isn't great, but it's definitely better than the ~11 frames back when the collection came out. Heck, even if you start at the LED press, that's ~5-6 frames of latency between Switch 1 'n 2.
Mind you, this was all basically a backyard test, not even vaguely scientific (I lined them all up in Blender's video editor and eyeballed the sync point), but I'd love to see someone with a better testing setup tackle this across platforms. Would be nice to know that they either found some way to optimize Saturn emulation or if they quietly changed the game code at some point to binary translation, akin to how I assume Capcom is running Dreamcast games on Switch via their own collection with 3.75 frames of latency: https://i.imgur.com/axb0OAX.png
