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Beginners > losing data packets in multiplayer

#29319 - greyboy - Wed Nov 17, 2004 9:10 pm

Hi,
Could someone give some insight in newbie terms into why coding multiplayer is riddled with problems? One thing I'm particularly interested in is how data packets would get lost or fail to transmit. What is it that causes this to happen on a direct gba link?

Let me emphasize "newbie terms" please. :)

#29326 - tepples - Wed Nov 17, 2004 11:01 pm

Three things:
  • GBA machines run at slightly different speeds due to individual manufacturing variations in the crystal that controls the CPU clock, so your typical game loop that executes once every vblank will eventually fall out of sync.
  • Only recently have publicly available emulators (namely no$gba 1.9 and VBALink) been able to emulate multiple linked GBA machines.
  • Many homebrewers cannot afford to purchase an extra GBA and an extra flash card.

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