Play DC link cable games online - testing needed

[Nico0020]

Man I remember this being discussed for a long time over at OC in the mid 2000s. Someone had supposdly gotten it working proof of concept, but never much after that. VERY cool to see this working.

[flyinghead]

I can share some experience on the subject from implementing battle cable support in Flycast, connecting Flycast instances over the network.

I found that F355 and Aero Dancing were the easiest to connect together. Virtual On would work fine in game but getting the peers to connect could take a few tries. Finally, Sega Tetris was the hardest and still doesn't work properly today. Hell Gate is somewhere in the middle but I didn't spend as much time on it.

The interesting thing regarding Tetris is that it uses break signals when establishing the connection, so the protocol I use in Flycast distinguishes between regular characters and breaks. Now a big part of my work was also to properly emulate the Dreamcast serial port, which isn't an issue with real hardware.

[BeeWildered]

Hasn't 'Faster Than Speed' got a serial link?

[flyinghead]

Maximum Speed uses a serial link.
Faster Than Speed uses the Atomiswave/DC BBA.

[deluxux]

That would be cool to get those Atomiswave games hooked up like multiplayer back in the arcades

[SEGA RPG FAN]

Interesting regarding Tetris. Do you know what baud rate it uses? AFAIK I've tried every rate I can think of and nothing worked. It's possible the breaks are messing my attempts up, but also as far as I know I'm reading all bytes and forwarding all bytes, so the tunnel should be transparent

[Anonymouse]

I am very interested in this. Specifically F355. What sort of distances has this been tested? UK to USA?

[SEGA RPG FAN]

I haven't done a lot of net testing yet. F355 Minnesota to Texas was great. No lag or desyncing.

[Xerxes3rd]

I built a "Crossover" serial link cable using the same "DC SD Adapter V2" devices that it looks like you're using. F355 worked fine, but VO:OT connects and works fine until the match starts, then it says "The Dreamcast VS Cable has been disconnected." Anyway, the next step is to add a logic analyzer to the setup to see actually what's happening on the wire, specifically with Tetris.

[Xerxes3rd]

Quick update on VO:OT- apparently this disconnection happens when you try to play with a GDI and (selfboot) CDI! The DC on the big screen has a GDEMU, whereas the one on the small screen is using a drive + burned disc. I tossed the CDI onto the GDEMU and it works fine. Next up, logic analyzer!