GBA multiplayer online

Reaperman@home · Post by **Reaperman@home** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 11:55 am

This has come up before in a few forums as being completely impossible--both in emulators and hardware. I, however, am pretty thick headed about it...

I'd like to gather some thoughts on it.

The gba serial connector can transfer data at up to 2Mbit/sec--but hopefully games won't reqire that much. For certain, the wireless compatable games will be slower.

USB is a good connection option, since drivers have already been written for loading/dumping cartridges with it. Software would probably only need to be written on the PC end. It can also easily become wireless (though not supercool wifi)

custom wireless hardware is yet another option as the multiboot area (512k?) is probably pleanty of space to tell it how to run.

Latency might be a bit of a problem for certain games not designed to take it (possibly all of them)

but even if commercial games aren't possible, emulators such as the NES one could probably be rewritten--I believe it's open source and already supports multiboot multiplayer.

just throwning an idea out there for conversation's sake. the USB method seems the easiest. Will DS wireless online support GBA? if it does, it's probably a lot easier than I'm thinking...

vb_master · Post by **vb_master** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 2:49 pm

No. Just no.
I wish people would stop posting stupid impossible ideas!

madc0w · Post by **madc0w** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 4:39 pm

i already posted this! SEARCH BOY!!!!!

Reaperman@home · Post by **Reaperman@home** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 6:07 pm

ah, search. found it.

I think the first step is buying one of those cables, and figuring out exactly how much and at what speed the gba is trying to push.

I suppose there's some kind of annoying handshaking to figure out too...

with a multiboot title it wouldn't be too hard to pickup the first signal and repeat it into a GBA to figure out the second portion. I've got watch all night, so I've got no shortage of time to look for usable tools for doing this.

maybe it would just take an out of the box USB forwarding solution--somebody must make one. unfortunately I don't think either parallel or usb can support it's maximum speed.

it may actually be easier to tear apart one of those generic 'works with any game' wireless adaptors and see how it does it. I hope it's not some kind of analog garbage.

vb_master · Post by **vb_master** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 7:11 pm

Multiboot cable's are really slow, I don't think it's feasible even with broadband.

extremesonic · Post by **extremesonic** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 8:52 pm

when im on my other computer I'll send you guys a link to the site( i have it BM on there) to set up both LAN and online, however i warn you now. With everything set on the lowest setting(and therefore fastest) on visualboy advance, with everything except internet and GBA open, on a DSL line, with someone whos fairly close to me, we were going a constant 6% with kirby. Unless your running a T1 line and some sort of god-like somputer, your going to go nowhere with online(LAN works fairly nice though).

Reaperman@home · Post by **Reaperman@home** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 9:05 pm

that's fantastic.
I didn't think VBA even supported it.

I wonder how much slower, say, a chess game transfers. The down side is that if it isn't any slower, only recoded games could use it.

honestly I didn't start thinking about it until I saw the gps attachment handled serial data transfer as low as 1200bps. traditional gba modes go as low as 9600. of course that's just simple serial--full gba link is probably more, but it shows that gba can connect to other devices at reasonable bandwidth.

extremesonic · Post by **extremesonic** » Sun Oct 02, 2005 9:47 am

http://www.vbalink.info/ theres the link, even though it says LAN for help and stuff, the same steps apply to online play.