Joust, multiplayer games in general?

[E474]

Hi,

 

   I saw the posts about hacking Capture The Flag to work with FujiNet, and I was wondering about how hackable Joust would be, as that's a really fun multi-player game.

 

   But then I was thinking maybe sending joystick inputs/updates was such a generic thing, maybe it would be better if this was handled in a common way via the FujiNet, maybe opening J1: - J4: on a remote Atari, and vice-versa? I don't have access to a FujiNet, or even an 8-bit at the moment, so I'm kind of fumbling around with this idea, but I think if you wanted to hack a number of games to support multiplayer over the net, you'd want as much commonality as possible.

[tschak909]

2 hours ago, E474 said:

Hi,

 

   I saw the posts about hacking Capture The Flag to work with FujiNet, and I was wondering about how hackable Joust would be, as that's a really fun multi-player game.

 

   But then I was thinking maybe sending joystick inputs/updates was such a generic thing, maybe it would be better if this was handled in a common way via the FujiNet, maybe opening J1: - J4: on a remote Atari, and vice-versa? I don't have access to a FujiNet, or even an 8-bit at the moment, so I'm kind of fumbling around with this idea, but I think if you wanted to hack a number of games to support multiplayer over the net, you'd want as much commonality as possible.

This is an area that needs people actively attempting to do things like this. I can't do it all.

 

-Thom

[777ismyname]

I *love* Joust and would dig playing with someone online. Hopefully this is the year that work on getting a good handle on assembly language. I look forward to anything you might do with this E474. 
 

I have been farting around with something more turn based than real-time, a sort of Angry Birds meets Q BASIC Gorillas type game. The stuff I was doing with trajectory/velocity/gravity was a little too slow, so I reduced the possible variations and just built tables into arrays. I’d also started a sort of reverse two player Flappy Bird, where the gap in the pipes were moved by one player as the other player tried to flap through them. Will be getting another FujiNet from Gavin soon and working on that and some other stuff as I’m able. 

 

 

[+selgus]

Back in the 90's I worked at a company called Catapult, where we built the X-BAND Modem and Network for 16-bit game consoles (I worked on the SEGA Genesis side). I modified existing SEGA game cartridges on the fly (we could sniff the address bus and re-vector specific addresses in ROM to our RAM, and execute patched code) to add network peer-to-peer game playing, for games that didn't originally support it.

 

We had two modes to allow linking one console (or computer) to another-- one where we sync'd the vertical blanks between the two machines (basically slew the two to keep them in sync) and the other was to send packets that were lock-step and acknowledgments between the two machines. We always sent the controller data and some state information between the two machines, to validate they were in sync (32-bits of data at 60Hz).

 

This kind of system could be done on the ATARI 8-bits too, I believe, to patch games so they could run in peer-to-peer.

 

There were other modifications we would make the to the game execution, to make sure we had deterministic results on both machines, each vertical blank (i.e this meant patching all non-deterministic code that introduced randomness).