My Ideas About Multiplayer

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Exophase
Posts:1716
Joined:Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:08 pm
Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by Exophase » Sat Jul 04, 2015 7:52 pm

I don't know how MyBoy!'s multiplayer works, but I have to stress again that DS and GBA have very different multiplayer hardware. While GBA games over serial may be latency sensitive to a large extent they could still be less so than DS is, just because that's the way the software works (or not, I don't really know what requirements the games impose) At any rate, GBA's serial interface, being implemented with a physical cable, is a lot simpler and well documented than DS's wireless interface that still isn't completely well understood.

Does anyone know how MyBoy!'s multiplayer performs over the internet as opposed to locally?

whgang99
Posts:12
Joined:Sun Jul 13, 2014 9:34 am

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by whgang99 » Sun Jul 05, 2015 5:11 am

What about no$gba? I heard there is a way to run ds multiplayer on nocash, although it's limited. I've once booted two animal crossing at the same time, but the second game without sav file, sound output and button inputs. Since Animal Crossing can be played with touch screen only, I tried to finish tom nook's errands and go to my village from the second game but I gave it up after a while for some reason other than the emulator...
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kaikun97
Posts:717
Joined:Thu Dec 26, 2013 11:41 am

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by kaikun97 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:47 am

Exophase wrote:I don't know how MyBoy!'s multiplayer works, but I have to stress again that DS and GBA have very different multiplayer hardware. While GBA games over serial may be latency sensitive to a large extent they could still be less so than DS is, just because that's the way the software works (or not, I don't really know what requirements the games impose) At any rate, GBA's serial interface, being implemented with a physical cable, is a lot simpler and well documented than DS's wireless interface that still isn't completely well understood.

Does anyone know how MyBoy!'s multiplayer performs over the internet as opposed to locally?
All I know is MyBoy can use Local Wifi and Bluetooth to use two phone multiplayer but it does have a impact on performance of MyBoy on older devices

whgang99
Posts:12
Joined:Sun Jul 13, 2014 9:34 am

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by whgang99 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 6:37 am

Well, i guess it runs two games on the server device. It is required that both devices have both roms to run a bluetooth multiplayer between different games. It might be because of that... Isn't MyBoy a port of gPSP? Doesn' Exophase know any about it?
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reeve
Posts:38
Joined:Wed Mar 26, 2014 6:44 pm

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by reeve » Tue Jul 07, 2015 4:49 pm

whgang99 wrote:Isn't MyBoy a port of gPSP? Doesn' Exophase know any about it?
He thinks it is not a port:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1203&start=10

Exophase
Posts:1716
Joined:Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:08 pm

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by Exophase » Tue Jul 07, 2015 6:22 pm

I don't really know anything about who made MyBoy! or how it was made (I mean, I have some guesses based on googling but nothing that's really relevant) so I don't really know anything concretely..

But I'm not aware of any evidence that shows MyBoy! copies anything from from gpSP, except that it has some of the same idle loop locations from the config file. But I don't consider this a real sort of license violation (others who contributed to that file are free to fight that instead). What I do know is that it has to be significantly different from gpSP at least where I left off with it because it doesn't have the same bugs and it has a lot of other features. While it's possible that this was added to gpSP that at least would suggest enough aptitude to make the author(s) capable of writing the whole emulator.

As for its multiplayer, here's what we know: it was first added as the ability to emulate multiple linked GBAs on the same device. Then in the next version netplay was added. So I'm guessing it follows the multiple device synchronization method, because it clearly has the foundation to do it that way.

behmer
Posts:3
Joined:Tue Apr 28, 2015 2:46 am

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by behmer » Fri Jul 10, 2015 3:56 am

I don't know if anyone is familiar with the developer(s) Garage Research Emulators, but they also have netplay over wifi with their VGB and VGBAnext emulators

Exophase
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Joined:Mon Aug 05, 2013 9:08 pm

Re: My Ideas About Multiplayer

Post by Exophase » Fri Jul 10, 2015 12:53 pm

behmer wrote:I don't know if anyone is familiar with the developer(s) Garage Research Emulators, but they also have netplay over wifi with their VGB and VGBAnext emulators
That's Marat Fayzullin, he has a Google+ group and posts on ngemu.com if anyone wants to contact him. I'm not personally going to bother him over this, I don't think it'll reveal an awful lot for DS WiFi emulation/synchronization.

This is what his FAQ says:

"When using NetPlay, each player must send a lot of data over the network and wait for the other player to acknowledge every packet they send. This wait time slows down the gameplay speed for both players. The wait is slightly worse for GameLink (in VGBA and VGB) because the data needs to be sent more often. While this slowdown is unavoidable and depends on your network speed, I am working to reduce it in the upcoming versions of my products."

If it's worse for VGB and VGBA that suggests that it's sending the serial data and not button data. Does anyone know what the performance is like over the internet?

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