VOGONS


First post, by hifidelitygaming

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Are there any emulators which actually emulate the proprietary (pre ethernet) networking protocols of older consoles and computers?

Three cases off the top of my head:

The Sega Saturn Netlink games - intended for dial up modem use, only worked on a few games sure, but they were the cooler games for the system. As good as emulation is, since you can't emulate this, it makes me want to hold onto my hardware saturns for awhile yet. (even though I don't have netlink modems for them nor the games in question, I hope to find both in the future just to set up for this)

The Atari Jaguar likewise - wasn't used in much, but AFAIK the emulators don't emulate the networking ability... of all the things to emulate i'd assume this should be easier than the complexity of a sound chip or such? Other than Doom and I think Battlemorph i'm not sure what else used it... but i'd be game for setting up multiple PC's with some wrapper program to virtually network games since finding the consoles is so hard.

The AtariST - although MIDI was mostly for music, it was also used for at least one game in particular - MIDImaze. Since that was THE game that got me into networked gaming/first person shooters in the first place i'd always wanted to at some point set up a couple of rooms in a MIDImaze network. But I can't do it with emulation that I know of... and Atari ST's have become darn expensive/more than i'd expect making it hard to pick up several just to play MIDImaze. 😜

There are probably other proprietary systems out there as well - I guess i'm a fan of the wierd and obscure and would consider it sort of a crowning ability for a gameroom (or multiroom game house) to wire up these proprietary networks with the multiple consoles required so that people can get together for LAN parties of games that existed before LAN parties. 😀 (sort of like I want to get a couple Steel Battalion controllers for Xboxen though that's a conventional LAN... the fact that it's rare, and uncommonly played is what makes it so interesting to me.)

Reply 1 of 2, by Sune Salminen

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The Amiga emulator WinUAE supports link play for games that used a null modem cable on the serial port, like Geoff Crammond's Stunt Car Racer.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=56146

I'd think that any respectable Atari ST emulator would have MIDI I/O support. Run a MIDI cable from one PC to another and see if you can get emulated Atari STs talking.