Gameboy emulation and linkcables?

[DaniPoo]

Hi I have been wondering why no Gameboy emulator supports wireless linking and I have got the answer that it's impossible due to latency stuff. Is this really the case? Also I have an idea on how to solve an issue like that.

The idea: Let say that we have two dedicated pokemon trainers who wants to trade pokemon between a pokemon blua & red.
Both players have their game Active and are standing in the pokemon center. Now they only need to connect.
Both players go into the "multiplayer menu" in the emulator and hit connect. This will connect the two devices and this is where the fun stuff starts. When (player1) are connected to (player2) his emulator will take a snapshot of his active game and send both the rom and the snapshot over to (player2)'s RAM and there it will run remotely in the background controlled by (player1) and vice versa.

Why would you do this? Well, Having both games running on the same machine would solve any latency problem. The trade is not performed between the two devices but rather happening between the two roms simultaneously on both Machines. and since the roms are so small and RAM in phones are getting bigger I dont think it would be a problem. Once the trade is complete and the players disconnects from eachother all "borrowed" stuff (ROM and RAM-snapshot) gets deleted from memory, and now they both have their new pokemon. Hooray!
In theory I Think this could work and I got the idea from Nintendos "Download Play".
What do you Think?

 

[TyBlood13]

Actually, GameYob has a very buggy NiFi link cable emulator included in it, check the front page

 

[finkmac]

If you are looking for a GameBoy emulator with Link cable emulation... Look for "TGB Dual"...

 

[DaniPoo]

Oh cool I wonder how that one works and why its so buggy, If they did it like in my idea I dont Think there would be many bugs at all. If im not mistaken there are a few PC emulators that supports running 2 roms and linking between them, and this is kind of expanding on that idea.

 

[DaniPoo]

TGB Dual "does the trade between games on the same machine" I was talking about.
But I Believe this could be expanded into trades between two handheld devices with a future emulator that supports this. If some emulator developer implemented a feature that worked this way

 

[DaniPoo]

I Believe that it would tecknically possible to do pokemon trades over the internet using this method. If the emulator had some kind of feature to register "online friends" but I guess thats just a litle bit overkill haha

 

[Necron]

TGB Dual also has online play, you just need to find the right version.

 

[DaniPoo]

@ ^ Cool But I was kinda thinking more about me and my friends in school trading some pokemon between our iPhones or whatever.
TGB Dual is PC only right?

 

[DaniPoo]

I Believe that Snes9xTYL for PSP supports a multiplayer mode similar to my idea, only that it requires the same exact rom to be on both devices.
My method use "download to RAM" so that both devices will have the same roms temporarely. It would be more Power demanting since both devices have to emulate both roms and also communicate.
But since Gameboy isnt that Heavy to emulate I Believe its possible on modern phones

 

[FAST6191]

Multiplayer on a home console is usually quite different to handhelds in that the consoles have the person there. However the method network play uses to work there (runs the ROM on a remote machine and the other players remote in similar to VNC/RDP) would probably be similar to how I would sort a latency problem. It might be slightly more problematic if you intend to do it on locked down phones and other nonsense that is a not proper computer by default but equally they do have reasonably fast processors so it could work.

That or for the 3 games people would actually play I would probably consider "fixing" the game instead.

 

[DaniPoo]

@FAST6191 I Think it makes much more sense to emulate Gameboy on a phone than on a PC because the Gameboy was a handheld gaming device and can be emulated pretty well on almost any device there is haha
Rather have my PC do the PS2 & Wii emulation