I bought a Japanese copy of Super Mario World on ebay (Japanese copies of games were peanuts at the time, I assume they're more now), and found an old CRT for cheap on a local used site. I continued to play SMW many times over the years on various platforms and emulators, and I'm pretty damn good at the game.
But man, did it blow my mind feeling as little input latency as I did the first time I booted it on a CRT after all those years. It actually took a little bit of time to adapt to. It's like that phenomenon where if a button activates a light with low enough latency, people think the light is predicting when they'll hit the button, i.e. turning on before the button is pressed. People don't realize the latency we started dealing with when everything went from analogue to digital!
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_interrupt#Nintendo_Ente...
- Controller buttons caused CPU interrupts, so basically 0 latency
- No OS getting in the way
- N64 era would be double buffered and then straight to the CRT
- NES era would literally calculate the pixels in real time as the CRT beam moved across the screen
- CRTs have virtually no latency, same with the analog signal chain because there is no buffering
So when people try to play them in modern systems, things that were easy back then are quite hard now.
There's a reason anybody speedrunning SM64 will play on a CRT.