Feature Request: Up Player Count from 6 to 12 for upcoming Saturn and PS1 cores

[KremlingKuthroat19]

MiSTer currently supports 6 players on one device which is great! With the upcoming PS1 and Saturn cores, both devices supported the use of 2 multitaps, allowing up to 8 players for PS1 and up to 12 players for Sega Saturn. In order to maintain authenticity, it's important to bring the player count from 6 to 12 on MiSTer so all the multitap games can be fully supported. I also think that Saturn's 12 player support is the highest count for any piece of video game hardware known to man, so if we get to 12 players supported on 1 device, there'll be no reason to increase that number.

The Sega Genesis has a few games that support 8 players via 2 Team Players. Here's the list: -Double Dribble: The Playoff Edition -Head-On Soccer -International Superstar Soccer Deluxe (E) -Mega Bomberman - Special 8-Player Demo (E) (homebrew) -Ultimate Soccer (E)

The SNES has 1 homebrew game that supports 8 players via 2 Super Multitaps. That's N-Warp Daisakusen.

[sorgelig]

6 players more than enough.

[KremlingKuthroat19]

6 players more than enough.

Why? With all due respect, isn't the MiSTer project about authenticity? Sure it's not practical to have 8 player or 12 player local sessions, especially with Covid and everything, but MiSTer's aim is to be as accurate a recreation of old hardware as possible. One of the unique features of these consoles was multitap support regardless of how often it's used or its practicality.

Just saying "6 players is enough" seems contrary to the goal of MiSTer which is to replicate all aspects of hardware via FPGA, regardless of how frequently or seldom-used some features are. Further, there are arcade games such as Tank 8, Sprint 8, etc. that support 8 players. Sure, they're not part of MiSTer as of yet, but the point is that 8 player support is the main selling point of these games as shown in the title so it'd be odd to have those games w/out 8 player support if they were added to MiSTer.

I'm aware it's an open-source project and I'm very grateful for everything we currently have. I'm curious, are there some technical challenges to upping the player count, or would it be doable if someone was motivated to do it?

[sorgelig]

There are technical aspects to support many players. Connecting 12 gamepads to MiSTer is a challenging aspect given a quite picky USB host which struggling to support several USB devices. I cannot even think about 12 gamepads. Each player also needs special routing on FPGA making those joystick_0...12 signals to crowded in the code. In practice, 1 or 2 players are playing. 12 is just a number for a record and marketing crap. Practically it's unreal number of players. MiSTer has limited resources/performance which can be used in a better way.

[KremlingKuthroat19]

Thanks for replying and I appreciate your breakdown on why adding additional gamepads is problematic. Since Sega Saturn is the only piece of hardware on the planet that supports ,more than 8 players (and even then it's a very small selection of games), is it realistic to ask for support to go from 6 to 8? I understand there's limited resources, but increasing to 8 would be a lot easier than 12 I'm assuming.

Therefore it'd cover all the Sony PlayStation games which have many games (around 100) that support 8 players, considering all the sports titles on the platform, as well as the aforementioned games on the above posts. There's only a small handful of Saturn games that support >8 players anyways so anything beyond 8 player support is diminishing returns anyways imo.

TLDR; Is it possible/feasible to bring support up to 8 controllers instead of 12? I'd be very happy with 8, I promise :)

[sonik-br]

I do like local multiplayer games and I do play saturn bomberman with 10 players from time to time (on real hardware)

But as sorgelig says this is not common and those resources could be used in better ways.

I think the way for it would be SNAC or LLAPI and use real multitap connected to the core. I don't know if LLAPI supports multitap.

[sorgelig]

In Russia we say: "Splitting a fur of not yet killed bear." Saturn core is not released yet.

[KremlingKuthroat19]

Well the PSX core is rapidly on it's way to completion! Does this mean you'd reconsider upping the player count to 8 please? :)

[Marteicos]

1+ for 8 controllers support, please.

[sorgelig]

Current amount of players is more than enough. Even with 6 players smooth handling is not guaranteed already.