> Games of the 8- and 16-bit console generations, as well as all arcade games up until that point, were written with CRT monitors in mind and often used 'racing the beam' techniques. This resulted in games with extremely low latency, something you never find in a game of any sort today.
The techniques haven't been lost - if anything there are probably more people who know how to do those things today than there were in the past.
Typical LCD monitors are undeniably worse in many ways than the CRTs they replaced, but again, most customers turned out to prefer the convenience of the LCD on the whole. Nowadays with the rise of 144Hz monitors those rare users who care a lot about gaming latency do have an option.
This article [1] has been posted on HN before but not everybody has read it so I thought I'd mention it here. If you scroll down there's a paragraph where Dan talks about 144 Hz gaming monitors. Shocker of Shockers (not surprising to me, actually) the Apple ][ has far lower latency than a modern PC, even with one of these monitors. When actually measured with a high speed camera, a CRT refreshing at 60 Hz still has lower average latency than a 144 Hz gaming LCD.
I would expect the NES to perform similarly to the Apple, since it has the same CPU (6502) and also uses a CRT display.
The techniques haven't been lost - if anything there are probably more people who know how to do those things today than there were in the past.
Typical LCD monitors are undeniably worse in many ways than the CRTs they replaced, but again, most customers turned out to prefer the convenience of the LCD on the whole. Nowadays with the rise of 144Hz monitors those rare users who care a lot about gaming latency do have an option.