Soulguy wrote:
Ket have you tried VBA link and either Hamachi or Tunngle? The server functions on VBA-M are greyed out on current release which is a shame, but this does look possible over the net. I'd be willing to test it out if you like.
The latency is just too great. Even when I try it on my LAN it slows the emulation to an absolute crawl due to the fact it keeps the multiple emulators in sync on every single frame. Running it through the internet is near impossible while Dolphin and VBA are separate emulators running as separate programs.
There's basically no way to keep them in sync other than forcing them to both wait until the other is ready to render the next frame, every frame. The only reason this works is because the latency between the two emulators is always zero when it's on the same PC.
RTS games get around this problem by queuing up and then syncing controls/orders every X number of rendered frames (a few times per second generally). This technique is now used by many net-play emulators to allow you to play NES/SNES/N64/etc games online. You get input latency but the game otherwise runs full speed.
Two completely different emulators that aren't really designed for the purpose of syncing, running on two completely different machines, are just never gonna get the speed right. The problem boils down to the fact that you technically have two "hosts" and no client, instead of a host and a client. Both systems assume full authority over the game, instead of one holding authority and replicating to the others.
The only other possible way is to not sync the emulators at all, and only run them on one PC, using remote input. Then stream the video to the other players. But of course, this has it's own massive input latency in the form of the time it takes to encode/stream and decode the video again. They need a buffer to actually work, so at best you'd have a latency of maybe 2-3 seconds, which is going to render an action game unplayable.
Basically, it's probably not going to happen until somebody re-engineers the game itself to use proper client-server style gameplay. Which is also not going to happen. All we can do is hope Nintendo themselves do it with some kind of 3DS remake. But Nintendo don't like making games work online; local MP or bust.
EDIT: Hurray for majorly off-topic new page.
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