Running/Playing an Xbox 360 from two different rooms

Tech Talk
1

So I have a decently small apartment, not huge by any standards. My bedroom borders the wall where my living room TV is. Both rooms have a SDTV. There is a hole (for the radiator to extend between rooms) large enough where I could run cable between both rooms. So my thought is to run a RF splitter and coax cable to both TV’s, as everything is hooked up to my VCR, then ran to my TV via coax cable. This won’t present a problem. However…

I want to play my 360 in my bedroom, particularly street fighter on my wired stick, from my bed. So, let’s run down the numbers. I’ve measured from my Xbox to my bedroom TV as needing 9 feet of cable. My madcatz Stick has about 8 foot of cable running from it. This requires 17’ of cable, whereas past 16’ of USB cable presents signal loss. I have been looking into getting a 16’ USB active extension cable to act as a repeater (as I can only find them in 8 & 16’), which should allow for no signal loss. My concern is lag. Would there be any input lag in using this to extend one of my Xbox’s USB ports to my bedroom?

Has anyone tested this to know how it would work, or been in this situation?

2

I googled and found this in the SRK archives:

And yeah the man is right. Let’s do some calculations for the hell of it (which i’m kinda sure i’m doing wrong but whatever)
Say you were using a solid shielded coax cable for USB which has a velocity factor of 66% of the speed of light (299792458 m/s).
This would result in a lag of roughly: ( 7.62m / c x 0.66 ) + 15 x 10^-9s (delay per hub) = 53.5 nano (x10^ -9) seconds

(sources wiki and google)

3

How about using the wireless? Its RF it should go through a wall without a problem.

Of course you would have to mod your stick with wireless :smiley:

4

Wireless sucks for gaming, period.

5

Tell that to people that paid like $100 for a Razer Mamba Mouse
It has like a .02ms response time.

6

That’s like comparing wired to wireless and saying wireless is better for gaming. Wired > Wireless, Always.
Wireless is horrible there should be ‘‘no’’ delay period, Which is very important in SF.

7

I understand the desire to reduce all forms of input lag as much as possible, but the latency differences between sane lengths of cable, and things like wired vs. wireless controllers are so slight that it makes no difference. We’re not talking a full frame of lag; a frame of lag is huge compared to the latency caused by these things, especially cable lengths.

As to the wired vs. wireless, see Toodles’ test from some time back.

8

Well, there are reasons I don’t go wireless:

  1. The time and money I would need to invest on my current sticks to make them wireless would be more than would be worth it, considering my sticks work fine now.
  2. I don’t own the Hori T6 stick, and don’t want it.
  3. I go to tournaments when I can, so I don’t want to set my sticks up with something that is discouraged in tournaments.

Glad to know there’s no lag though. I’ll get the USB extension cable asap.

9

I’ve never tested this device myself, but my favorite website for cables has this:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10303&cs_id=1030304&p_id=6042&seq=1&format=2

It claims 150ft of extension using cat5e or cat6 cables. You can buy the cable there cheap as well.

10

That’s more expensive than the 16’ extension cable that I’m looking at, which is more than enough cable for me.

11

Whoopsies.

12

I own one. The wireless sucks. I bought it because it was comfy.