Dreamcast-Talk.com

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!