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ekeeke / Genesis-Plus-GX

An enhanced port of Genesis Plus - accurate & portable Sega 8/16 bit emulator
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Zero Tolerance Link Cable Support #285

Open BondarenkoArtur opened 5 years ago

BondarenkoArtur commented 5 years ago

As I know Genesis Plus GX supports multiplayer (netplay in retroarch). But Zero Tolerance support coop play through link cable. So in real life you need two consoles and two games to play in two players mode. I've seen that big amount of different accessories are supported by this emulator and game compatibility list are full. Is there any plans to add support for link cable? image image

ekeeke commented 5 years ago

The difference with this 'accessory' is that there isn't nothing much to emulate hardware-wise, it's only a cable connecting emulated i/o ports, the communication protocol is entirely handled by emulated game software. The main problem is that you actually need to run two instances of the emulator and keep them in sync every frame, while letting users interfacing with them. Netplay is not really adapted for emulating this as 1) the data exchanged on i/o ports is actually computed by the emulated software instead of being just controller input data computed by frontend and is bi-directional (each instance needs to both send and receive data) and 2) netplay latency is probably way too high to simulate local wire connection as the two running games expect the other one to react to sent data within the next coming frames (which is way different from dealing with only input latency).

All these reasons explain why no emulators implement ZT link cable support and why there aren't much plans to support it. I leave this open though, similarly to Game Gear link cable support, as people might still come up with some nice frontend solution someday to run two instances of the emulator simultaneously (or quite) and make them exchange data.

77ZaRR77 commented 4 years ago

I myself remember found a byte in a rom which made spawn second player (dead though). Thought, maybe for emulation better make 2 small romhacks: server rom and client rom files.

Cloxter commented 4 months ago

Dang, it is still not entirely possible at this time is it?

I tried simply using Retroarch's netplay and it did not work, funny enough i thought it was possible by this point because i asked AI and it told me it could be done but at last at this time it doesn't work, not even the recent re-releases for modern consoles has the 2 Player feature at all which is surprising to me

DeltaBladeXNZ commented 4 months ago

AI doesn't know beans, and the 'modern re-releases for modern consoles' is a company that buys up dead IPs then uploads ROMs with a pretty crap emulator. Sadly emulation of this game in multiplayer is unlikely and this would never get a remake from the current owners.