Gamecube Adapter Lag

[Deleted member]

I've never felt any input lag and I usually notice this stuff instantly from the GC Adapter, but I saw from some early November posts on reddit that it had lag or that it "should" have lag cause it's an adapter.

Have any tests been made on this? I find it hard to believe it would have lag.

 

[Siledh]

I have had bad experiences with third party adapters, but Nintendo's seems solid.

 

[deepseadiva]

Even if it does, what other option is there really.

 

[HeavyMetalSonic]

I've never had a problem with the Official Nintendo adapter, on my Wii U on Smash 4 or PC playing Project M. A friend of mine also has the Mayflash 4 slot adapter, which has been working fine for him too. So if you can't get a hold of the Nintendo one, Mayflash is another good one to go for, and you don't even need to calibrate or setup the Mayflash one on PC, just flick the switch to PC mode and you're off. And my friend is someone who likes to moan if there is something wrong with a piece of tech he has, so it must be good.

 

[LancerStaff]

It's faster then the Pro controller, and that's all that really matters.

I've done some pretty casual testing. Yaknow, just pressing A on the different controllers at the same time.

 

[Deleted member]

Even if it does, what other option is there really.

Thread is not about options, actually. It's about either or not the GC adapter has any lag which I doubt it does personally. The official one, anyway.

I've never had a problem with the Official Nintendo adapter, on my Wii U on Smash 4 or PC playing Project M. A friend of mine also has the Mayflash 4 slot adapter, which has been working fine for him too. So if you can't get a hold of the Nintendo one, Mayflash is another good one to go for, and you don't even need to calibrate or setup the Mayflash one on PC, just flick the switch to PC mode and you're off. And my friend is someone who likes to moan if there is something wrong with a piece of tech he has, so it must be good.

Yeah, I'm like that as well and would usually notice if there's input lag. If there is any, it would have to be incredibly low as I sometimes play Smash 4 on a CRT and would notice it.

 

[Doval]

This sort of thing is so subject to placebos that I'd take anyone's words with a grain of salt unless they've done verifiable testing.

There's no particular reason I know of to suspect the adapter would be laggier than the wireless controllers and I have subjectively not noticed any lag. I recall an old Shoryken.com thread where someone did some very thorough testing of PS3 and XBox 360 controllers both wireless and wired and couldn't find a difference. The URL was http://forums.shoryuken.com/index.p...lag-any-reason-to-stick-to-a-wired-pcb.49295/ but it seems to be dead. For whatever it's worth it was done by the same guy that produced the Cthulu arcade circuit board. He knows what he's doing.

 

[JoeR]

Can you really test this? How can we call it lag when most controllers are wireless to begin with? Do those have lag?

 

[HeavyMetalSonic]

Can you really test this? How can we call it lag when most controllers are wireless to begin with? Do those have lag?

Kokonoe is refering to wired adapters though, not Pro controllers or Gamepads which are wireless.

Lag is sometimes so small it's negliable. But sometimes it's there, and you notice it pretty quickly when playing a game at a fast, competitive pace. You don't want to get weighed down by the controller not giving you the input fast enough, and someone getting a hit in on you first, when you might have inputted a move SLIGHTLY earlier than them, but lag caused you to act second. It's almost like playing a game online and having input lag, for reference.

It's pretty easy to test too, you just have to press a button at the same time on two pads. You can easily test it repeatedly too to be sure that there is any lag.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

Kokonoe is refering to wired adapters though, not Pro controllers or Gamepads which are wireless.

Lag is sometimes so small it's negliable. But sometimes it's there, and you notice it pretty quickly when playing a game at a fast, competitive pace. You don't want to get weighed down by the controller not giving you the input fast enough, and someone getting a hit in on you first, when you might have inputted a move SLIGHTLY earlier than them, but lag caused you to act second. It's almost like playing a game online and having input lag, for reference.

It's pretty easy to test too, you just have to press a button at the same time on two pads. You can easily test it repeatedly too to be sure that there is any lag.

The point is that it's relative. The adapter by physics must induce SOME lag. However, it may be less than the lag induced by every other possible source. Of course, in reality every controller is this way including wired connections on older consoles; unless you can make electrons move at infinite speed (not limited by the speed of light) and unless you can make the logic gates within the console that interpret the data have zero gate delays, there will always be some degree of lag between when you hit a button and when something happens in the game. However, since actions in the game are quantized to only occur every 1/60 of a second, if the total amount of lag is below 1/60 of a second, you'll have an effectively random delay of either 0f or 1f depending on when in the window between frames you input your action with reducing the lag only shifting the probability that your lag will be 0f instead of 1f.

I suppose my point is that it's not testable whether the official adapters lag to any extent since every other controller lags to a similar or greater extent as far as we can tell, and it would take very sophisticated equipment to detect lag in isolation. I'm pretty sure the GC adapter's amount of lag is sub-1 frame (I believe sophisticated testing has revealed the gamepad display lags by a pretty consistent 1 frame from the actual game state in every Wii U game, and I'm pretty sure the GC adapter is to some extent faster than that though perhaps not much). I do not know about third party adapters, but I feel they're inconsistent. I was at a tournament that was using two different types of third party adapters, and while the first kind seemed just like the official one, the second kind seemed just a bit off to me. Then again, this same tournament had effectively no sound on their set-ups (this bothers me a ton; I don't need to hear loudly, but I do need to hear "at all") and the room was so densely packed that it was a pretty high pressure situation just trying to play at all so there could easily have been psychological factors making play seem worse than it should have... It would definitely be pretty good if people actually have access to these dubious third party adapters if we could document their behavior versus the official ones; I'd definitely like to know which adapters to refuse to play with in tournament.

 

[LinkHarper]

I have a third party and a Nintendo adapter and while the third party has definitely given me some issues, the Nintendo adapter has been very good to me.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

If anyone wants to do some thorough testing on this sort of thing, I suggest examining this video for inspiration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoJzobmdGzU

I believe sophisticated testing has revealed the gamepad display lags by a pretty consistent 1 frame from the actual game state in every Wii U game

It varies by game, actually. I've tested this myself and found that the implementation of a lot of Virtual Console games is just flat-out broken on the Gamepad:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=799037

 

[Deleted member 269706]

Has anyone compared the Mayflash Adapter to the Official Nintendo Adapter? I'm very curious to see how Mayflash handles, been thinking about getting one since it seems to be way cheaper atm.

 

[Teh Sandwich]

The third party adapters work great, but they do cut out every once in a while, so I wouldn't trust one in a tournament match

 

[HeavyMetalSonic]

Has anyone compared the Mayflash Adapter to the Official Nintendo Adapter? I'm very curious to see how Mayflash handles, been thinking about getting one since it seems to be way cheaper atm.

We meet again...

Honestly, if there is any differences, it's not noticable. Infact the mayflash works better if you're going to use it on your PC for any reason, there's no messing about with any programs, calibrating or anything like that, just plug and play. There is no noticable lag as far as I can tell. This is according to my friend who is incredibly anal/fussy about things like that. But he's actually here right now with it, so I'll give it a proper go and change this if I notice anything.

 

[Deleted member 269706]

We meet again...

Honestly, if there is any differences, it's not noticable. Infact the mayflash works better if you're going to use it on your PC for any reason, there's no messing about with any programs, calibrating or anything like that, just plug and play. There is no noticable lag as far as I can tell. This is according to my friend who is incredibly anal/fussy about things like that. But he's actually here right now with it, so I'll give it a proper go and change this if I notice anything.

Hey thanks for the reply man. I was actually thinking about getting one for my PC since I've been messing around with the Melee 20XX Training mod a bit lately, and obviously would use it with my version of Smash Wii U from time to time. So yeah, I guess I'll be getting one of those seeing as they are just as reliable. Thanks again man, stay brutal

 

[Guillaume1987]

Can't say if it's a lag or a trouble with my adapter, but sometime, in the heat of battle, when I input fast commands, I noticed that smashing the joystick in a direction sometime result in my character going in the opposite direction. Same thing happens when I use the C-stick to attack in a direction it will do the attack in the other direction. It happens rarely and I havent't been able to recreate it consistently. But this anomaly really can spell doom when it happen in a heated match. Anybody else experienced this?

 

[HeavyMetalSonic]

Hey thanks for the reply man. I was actually thinking about getting one for my PC since I've been messing around with the Melee 20XX Training mod a bit lately, and obviously would use it with my version of Smash Wii U from time to time. So yeah, I guess I'll be getting one of those seeing as they are just as reliable. Thanks again man, stay brutal

After a few hours of use, I can confirm that they're absolutely fine. The only thing that you might have to mess with though is the threshhold radius and deadzone radius on the Anologue stick and C stick in the emulator (Dolphin in my case) settings.

I found that the threshhold wasn't great enough on the A stick, so when trying to dash, it wouldn't happen as the emulator only picks up pressing the stick about half way (The default setting for threshhold is 70, I set it to 100 and it worked absolutely fine), and ignores the rest.

As for the C stick, this happened with the official Nintendo adpter too, the deadzone wasn't big enough. This resulted in me pressing the C stick and it'd do a smash attack, but if I tried it again, it wouldn't pick it up, because it thought the C stick was still being pressed from the last time I pressed it. Like the A stick, the Threshhold is set to 70, so I just made the deadzone 35, half of the threshhold radius, and it fixed it. You could probably have a smaller deadzone but I found because I flick the C stick so fast it didn't matter how large the deadzone was.

As for lag, no lag at all. It felt the exact same as the Official one. So if you can't get an official one I'd highly recommend the Mayflash.

 

[ShuckleBoard]

Thanks for the help @ HeavyMetalSonic even though I didn't ask your post made me decide to buy a Mayflash. Goodbye Gamepad

 

[Jrodthesage]

I have Nintendos and it works fine for me

 

[Emblem Lord]

The lag is real and it's in milliseconds. They all lag. ALL OF THEM. But with the higher quality adapters like Nintendo it's not enough that you will feel it.

 

[ItsRainingGravy]

If there is any lag, it is probably so minuscule that it won't affect how you play.

The only real kind of "lag" that will affect you in a match in Smash 4 is your reaction times. Unless there's a glitch in the game or something.


...or if you are playing on For Glory.

 

[HeavyMetalSonic]

You also have to consider, HDTV's also have video lag if you're gonna test lag. More recent ones cut down on this, but it's still there. But if everyone is susceptible to it, by both using the same TV and adapter, then it's still an even playing field, although a different experience to what you're used to.

I've played enough Guitar Hero at high level on multiple TV's (And consoles, Wii and PS2 being Standard Definition and 360/PS3 being High Def, they are COMPLETELY different, sometimes 50ms different depending on the TV, making the game unplayable if you aren't used to it) to know that TV's make a MASSIVE difference when it comes to video lag.

The same can be applied to Smash, which is why people tend to opt fot SD TV's when playing Melee, HD TV lag can completely through you off.

I know my TV has about 3-5ms of lag, so if you want to test it thoroughly, you'll either need a good HDTV, or a SDTV. But from testing multiple ones for a good amount of time I find the lag negliable. It's not noticable if it's there in all honesty.

And I'm glad to be helpful @ ShuckleBoard . c:

 

[srn347]

Adaptor lag is thoroughly negligible, I've heard it's about 1/4 frame at worst.