Background
There’s is a long-standing belief that MAME has high input lag for Psikyo games (especially earlier titles), so I decided to have a look.

Some people use an ancient MAME-fork called “Shmupmame“, since it has less input lag for these games. I assumed this was due to bugs in the MAME driver, so I started probing some PCBs of mine to figure out how they work.
The MAME drivers report 4 frames of lag on the earlier titles (which is also what I saw when emulating them), and while I did find some things worth adjusting in the MAME driver, these things don’t have any impact on latency. I did however find something else interesting…
Early Psikyo PCBs have quite a bit of lag!

So yeah, the TL;DR is that MAME is accurate, because the Early Psikyo PCBs also have the same amount of input lag. The relevant games are:
- Sengoku Ace / Samurai Aces
- Gunbird
- Battle K-Road
- Strikers 1945
- Tengai / Sengoku Blade
“Frames of input lag” is a ambiguous term though, so to be clear:
- Button/lever is pressed during frame 0
- No sprite movement on frame 1
- No sprite movement on frame 2
- No sprite movement on frame 3
- Sprite movement on frame 4!
Also note that when playing original hardware, the input lag will vary by up to one additional frame depending on the raster beam position of the screen at time of button press, since inputs are sampled once per frame. Additionally sprites further up on the screen will be updated quicker, since the beam scans up-to-down.
Here is two typical example of what it can look like on Tengai shot in 240fps.
Note that time from button press until bomb animation starts is the same as for lever input to player movement in this game (in some other games that is not true).
“Fast case” for Tengai
See images at: http://img.buffis.com/psikyo/lag_fast/
- Img 5: Button is pressed (see LED), right before it gets sampled.
- Img 6-9: One frame of no sprite movement
- Img 10-13: One frame of no sprite movement
- Img 14-17: One frame of no sprite movement
- Img 18: Bomb animation starts
“Slower case” for Tengai
See images at: http://img.buffis.com/psikyo/lag_slow/
- Img 5: Button is pressed right AFTER it gets sampled.
- Img 6-8: Game still doesn’t know button was pressed
- Img 9: Finally button is sampled
- Img 10-13: One frame of no sprite movement
- Img 14-17: One frame of no sprite movement
- Img 18-21: One frame of no sprite movement
- Img 22: Bomb animation starts
Tengai in MAME
In MAME, the easiest way to verify that its similar timing as on PCB is to do the following:
- Bind buttons for “Pause” and “Pause – Single Step” (UI input menu)
- Pause game while not inputting anything
- Hold bomb button (or direction) when paused, and doing steps below
- Pause Single Step (One frame of no sprite movement)
- Pause Single Step (One frame of no sprite movement)
- Pause Single Step (One frame of no sprite movement)
- Pause Single Step (Animation starts)
Basically… everything seems fine.
What about later games?
Later games have much lower input latency on PCB. These include:
- Sol Divide
- Strikers 1945 II
- Strikers 1945 III
- Gunbird 2
- Dragon Blaze
- …
… but they do on MAME too.
When testing Strikers 1945 II on PCB, I get one frame of no sprite movement. MAME produces the same result as PCB if using the Pause+Step method described above.
Basically, the newer games have two frames less input lag on both PCB and MAME compared to the older games.
But shmupmame has less lag on the early games right?
Yes, shmupmame has less lag than MAME and original PCBs for early Psikyo games. It does this by shortcuts that are possible since some buffers can be safely skipped in emulation, if not worrying about emulating the hardware accurately. If you prefer to play these games like that, then that’s fine too. It’s just not how the games worked originally 🙂
Other stuff I fixed in the MAME Psikyo driver
Still made some solid improvements though.
- Measured accurate HSync and VSync timings. Previously they were not correct.
- Fixed various issues in documentations
- Corrected vertical blanking interrupt level (was irq1, should be irq4)
- Removed MACHINE_IMPERFECT_TIMING from all relevant machines, since they’re now verified to work correctly
For reference, correct timings are:
SYNCS: HSync 15.700kHz, VSync 59.923Hz HSync most likely derived from 14.3181MHz OSC (divided by 912) 262 lines per frame consisting of: - Visible lines: 224 - VBlank lines: 38 (Front/Back porch: 15 lines, VSync: 8 lines)
TL;DR
MAME is fine and accurate for Psikyo games in terms of input latency, you don’t need old forks.
