Very cool. Another piece of "massively multiplayer" Game Boy trivia that might be of interest:
There is a Game Boy game published in 1991 called Faceball 2000. It's a first person shooter that supports up to 16 players with a homebrew hardware connector. This was even before Nintendo's own 4-player adapter was available for any games. The connector was not Nintendo-endorsed so it could not be shipped with the game but the code is still there in the ROM. Disclosure: I was a programmer at the small company responsible but not the genius himself. You can read a short interview with him here.[1]
The 16-player multiplayer is advertised on the box, but its unclear whether the 16-player Faceball match happened. "Punching Weight" looked into it a while back, apparently some crazy retro nerds managed get a 9-player game running on real hardware quite a while back:
Ahh I loved faceball 2000! I played the shit out of that game when I was a kid! Never got a chance to try the multiplayer, none of my friends had it and that cord was not in the price range of a 3rd grader
Several years ago I went looking for a GameBoy emulator that let you do multiplayer over the Internet, basically tunneling VideoLink over TCP. I was very surprised to find no support for this in any known emulator.
As a step to writing a patch for this myself, I hacked in some analysis to try to at least reverse-engineer the GameBoy Tetris protocol (also seemingly unpublished anywhere on the Internet) but never got very far.
Isn't there some generic tool for handling transmitting keypresses? Then you could use an emulator with local multiplayer (I know this exists at least for two-player) and a video link to have both machines emulated on one host, and one working remotely.
At worst you could have have a limited vnc session or something.
Stacksmashing is well worth a follow on YouTube[0]. They’ve been cranking out some seriously awesome projects lately with very detailed breakdown videos that have taught me heaps. Reverse engineering and adding homebrew support to the Game & Watch, and hacking AirTags and running their own code on it, among others.
A decade+ ago I played Pokemon on GBC/GBA emulators and I always wondered why I can't play online link cable multiplayer and back then I heard that the link cable requires real time communication and any sort of network latency will kill the RT guarantee--I wonder what's different now?
edit: okay looks like their scheme doesn't work for arbitrary games and arbitrary protocols.
Tetris is panic attack at 1000 whats most cases is when you lose it it’s because your brain functions stops and a part of your memory is gone the more you play the most dare you’ll get. I consider this a death penalty watch nintendo will not put precaution on whats being advertised let the kids decide.
[+] [-] emptybits|4 years ago|reply
There is a Game Boy game published in 1991 called Faceball 2000. It's a first person shooter that supports up to 16 players with a homebrew hardware connector. This was even before Nintendo's own 4-player adapter was available for any games. The connector was not Nintendo-endorsed so it could not be shipped with the game but the code is still there in the ROM. Disclosure: I was a programmer at the small company responsible but not the genius himself. You can read a short interview with him here.[1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100509163809/http://fb2k.retro...
[+] [-] lostgame|4 years ago|reply
I’d love to think John Carmack is here among us; cleverly disguised under some cute u/n we’d never get unless it was explained to us.
[+] [-] ant6n|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyK-2LWB734&t=42s
[+] [-] grenoire|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konfusinomicon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuaxo|4 years ago|reply
Hopefully someone forks the Tetris multiplayer to work with this.
[+] [-] CamelRocketFish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|4 years ago|reply
As a step to writing a patch for this myself, I hacked in some analysis to try to at least reverse-engineer the GameBoy Tetris protocol (also seemingly unpublished anywhere on the Internet) but never got very far.
[+] [-] Y_Y|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrslave|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TetriNET
[1] http://gtetrinet.sourceforge.net/ (no HTTPS unfortunately)
[+] [-] ZitchDog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sen|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://youtube.com/c/stacksmashing
[+] [-] hatsunearu|4 years ago|reply
edit: okay looks like their scheme doesn't work for arbitrary games and arbitrary protocols.
[+] [-] raldi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostgame|4 years ago|reply
Coming from the ROM hacker scene I initially was confused by this; too - but absolutely understand it’s impracticality difficult from a technical end.
[+] [-] bullen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Juntu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|4 years ago|reply