Multiplayer Idea

[HackModford]

I got this simple idea in my head.

Would it be possible for someone to have their pandora running a emulator. Then have a friends Pandora act as a bluetooth controller? That way you could have 2 people playing with one pandora.

The harder part would be having the video sent to the other guys pandora.

With a simple program doing this in the background you could have multiplayer for just about everything.

Is the video part feasible?

Do you understand my idea :blink:

 

[bzar]

There are many emulators with multiplayer capabilities, though you would probably want to use the wifi, not bluetooth. I'm not convinced any "generic" (meaning you could use it with anything) solution would work nicely.

 

[HackModford]

Yeah, wifi, bluetooth, or both... whatever is needed.

The beauty in this concept is you have a simple "daemon" (I think that's what it's called) streaming the video to the other pandora, making nearly every "potential" multiplayer game multiplayer. Until devs implement multiplayer for pandora 2 pandora "p2p"

 

[JayFoxRox]

The idea is the same like streaming videos from your PC. This can be done with VNC for example but its probably too slow for most things (even with low res games). The same is done on some emulators running on the xbox.
However, most people won't have any friends with Pandoras so multiplayer will seldomly happen for most of us, and streaming video over the internet next to emulating another system sounds REALLY hard imo. Its much more likely that emulators will use the video out and external joysticks and gamepads for multiplayer.

 

[HackModford]

Ah... yes that's true. But I'm not saying stream the video over the internet. I mean stream it directly to another pandora.

 

[habib15]

If someone wrote a USB driver you could probably connect the two with a USB cable and have it act like a controller and a remote screen. The USB bandwidth should be plenty for 800x480 display and controls sent.

 

[HackModford]

Yes

 

[JayFoxRox]

Kevin_H: No, USB won't work neither, its by far too slow. RemoteJoy for PSP also fights alot with bandwidth problems. Tyranid has shown that it is possible but still not fast enough for most things.
HackModford: Streaming to another Pandora is quite useless because there are about 5000 Pandoras world-wide which means that you will not meet a lot of people who own a Pandora too. Most developers won't implement this feature for close networks for that reason. The only option is the internet, but thats too slow.
This is what I tried to say before.

 

[God Ginrai]

Kevin_H: No, USB won't work neither, its by far too slow. RemoteJoy for PSP also fights alot with bandwidth problems. Tyranid has shown that it is possible but still not fast enough for most things.
HackModford: Streaming to another Pandora is quite useless because there are about 5000 Pandoras world-wide which means that you will not meet a lot of people who own a Pandora too. Most developers won't implement this feature for close networks for that reason. The only option is the internet, but thats too slow.
This is what I tried to say before.

I know 2 other people who live near me who pre-ordered a Pandora. I also know a couple more who plan to see how ours turn out, and if so, buy ones for themselves. Not to mention, you don't seem to hold much stock in the ability of the Pandora to sell more batches.

-God Ginrai

 

[WizardStan]

Kevin_H: No, USB won't work neither, its by far too slow. RemoteJoy for PSP also fights alot with bandwidth problems. Tyranid has shown that it is possible but still not fast enough for most things.

800*480*2*30*8 = 184320000. That's less than half the throughput USB2.0 is supposed to support, and that's just raw data; you could use simple compression to get that down to a half or even quarter with minimal CPU overhead. I don't see how you can make the argument that USB is too slow when the numbers suggest it shouldn't be.

QUOTE
HackModford: Streaming to another Pandora is quite useless because there are about 5000 Pandoras world-wide which means that you will not meet a lot of people who own a Pandora too.
Except for those of us who bought multiple, or convinced their friends to buy one as well. You forget, geeks tend to hang out in packs.
QUOTE
Most developers won't implement this feature for close networks for that reason.
Developer shouldn't have to. I don't see any reason it couldn't be implemented as some kind of kernel module (or something) that just clones video memory and spits it out on the USB. Then it would become a basically "free" feature for every app that used just the one screen. Including TV out in the equation probably makes things too complicated anyway.

 

[HackModford]

This isn't something a developer implements. It's an entire seperate program you run in the background that simply streams the video to other nearby Pandoras.

The idea is you can use this for just about any program you've got running.

 

[JayFoxRox]

HackModford: Right so a non-developer implements it or what? Even if someone does it, I still think its by far too cpu intense and bandwidth hungry for faster games. It works fine for some nes soccer games in a wired lan on the original xbox but thats it.. Would be surprised if someone got more working. I m not sure if you ever tried to play games via VNC or even streaming apps. made for games - its still really slow, even in your local network.
WizardStan: http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=7471 - I also own alot of device with USB and none of them got the bandwidth and short delay required to stream realtime for games. Compression usually adds even more delay.

 

[HackModford]

Oh :lol: I think we were both misunderstanding each other for a second.

One guy makes an emulator.

Another guy makes this p2p app you run in background that works with every single program you can run because all it's doing is streaming what's on your screan, and reading another pandora just like a bluetooth/wifi controller.

Now, if you think it's too CPU intensive... you're probably right, but is the concept good?

 

[WizardStan]

Be fair: I was talking theory based on the spec, not practical. I've never gotten the PSP to exceed a half dozen Mbit per second transfer either. But this isn't a PSP. The Pandora may have a better communication channel. Don't discount it as a failure because another device is unable to do so. It's something to experiment with when it finally comes out.

 

[lulzfish]

The concept is good, but the part where you stream video from the screen is very difficult to implement.

Something like emulating the GBA's multiboot would be simpler [from a network perspective at least] because each Pandora would be generating its own video stream.

If there was an emulator that had a language to specify graphics primitives, and then it just streamed the primitives to the other Pandora for rendering [Sort of like a network OGL server, I think this has been attempted] that would also work better [much less bandwidth than streaming the whole screen, and far better reproduction at the other end], although the latency of Wi-fi could still ruin it.

 

[dflemstr]

Guys, I'm just wondering... Why do you want a screen sync and a video stream?
It would be more future-proof and less bandwidth-demanding if you just ask the emulator developer to implement an interface to POND or TINXL; then you can play vs another Pandora owner wherever this particular person happens to be.

(POND or TINXL are two networking systems that let you meet up with people playing the same games as you are in a lobby-like fashion and connect to those people, while not using more bandwidth then strictly necessary because no video is being sent, just synchronization information that is needed. This is possible because the same emulator with the same game is running on both platforms, so why sync video?)

EDIT: if you really want a generic solution, however inefficient, just go with a VNC server...

 

[God Ginrai]

Guys, I'm just wondering... Why do you want a screen sync and a video stream?
It would be more future-proof and less bandwidth-demanding if you just ask the emulator developer to implement an interface to POND or TINXL; then you can play vs another Pandora owner wherever this particular person happens to be.

(POND or TINXL are two networking systems that let you meet up with people playing the same games as you are in a lobby-like fashion and connect to those people, while not using more bandwidth then strictly necessary because no video is being sent, just synchronization information that is needed. This is possible because the same emulator with the same game is running on both platforms, so why sync video?)

Agreed.

My point was just that Jay was wrong in thinking that there wouldn't be people near each other with Pandoras.

However, would implementing POND and/or TINXL allow users to connect each other's Pandoras if they are near each other without messing with the internet? Because I want to see internet connectivity and intersystem connectivity as two seperate features, so that you get less lag when you are near each other.

-God Ginrai

 

[Raz]

How's multiplayer on emulators via a USB Controllers connected to a USB Hub gonna work out? I also have a PS2 to USB Adapter with spots available for 2 controllers, how bout that?

 

[God Ginrai]

How's multiplayer on emulators via a USB Controllers connected to a USB Hub gonna work out? I also have a PS2 to USB Adapter with spots available for 2 controllers, how bout that?

That should work fine as long as the dev takes the time to add that functionality in. And if they add any multiplayer functionality in, that'll probably be the first they add. However, that would be a more TV-out centered solution, and we're talking about solutions that would allow us to play portably with each other.

-God Ginrai

 

[HackModford]

That's great if you got 2 friends with no pandoras

But this idea is for when your friends do have it. They want to use their pandoras to play too. Also this is for if the game you want to play doesn't have multiplayer yet.