17 replies to this topic

[rush6432]

Ok guys, after hours and hours of research and TONS of testing and barrowing a few copies of games i have results. I am able to play doom and aircars over a LAN and possibly the internet... HOWEVER... the program i am using to do such is not custom written and is a production piece of software which causes alot of issues with these games. What is needed is a custom program that is taylored to the way these games communicate to speed things up a bit.

Im looking to see if there is a programmer that can help here. I have figured out all the framework and settings here and done the testing and research with some input from Zerosquare for aircars. I need someone who is familiar with windows and coding network programs. (serial and tcp/udp coding). If you know someone that can help, PLEASE pm me.

We all know there is quite a bit of tension in the commuity here, but if for once anyone and everyone could put their heads together to help... Im not asking for everyone to sit around the campfire here and sing songs....but if everyone can put aside any diffrences they may have within the jag community for one project and do this for the love of the jag. There isn't much left anymore, so you have to make the best of whats left.


Small example of doom running.. jag to jag with connection over a LAN through a router.

[wozencl]

Great work! *Crosses fingers*

[Jag_Slave]

Hopefully you get more help with this soon!!!

[Sargon]

I wish I could be of help, but I'm afraid I have little to no knowledge of network programming. I am very interested in the outcome of this project though, so I really hope someone steps up!

[thund3r]

This looks awesome, wasnt there a group (many) years ago looking into doing a source port of Doom for jaguar and improving upon a few bugs? Would it be possible to work with them in conjuction with your idea to get a LAN or IP based doom working? (just a thought!)

[kskunk]

rush6432, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 9:03 AM, said:

What is needed is a custom program that is taylored to the way these games communicate to speed things up a bit.

Curious programmers want to know... what kind of tailoring is necessary?

I imagine these games aren't very latency tolerant, because on a local link, they don't have to be.

Is latency the issue? If it's not latency, I'm drawing a blank on what it could be. Any program that goes UART to network to UART should work the same, except for the latency.

If it is latency, going over the internet could be a big challenge. I consider my home internet connection pretty good, but going out to a friend down the street is about 20ms round trip, which is longer than a screen refresh on NTSC. Going California to New York is 90ms, which seems well beyond the limit of a game not designed for internet play.

- KS

[Zerosquare]

rush6432, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 9:03 AM, said:

I need someone who is familiar with windows and coding network programs. (serial and tcp/udp coding).

I can help with the serial communications part, but my skills in TCP/IP coding are rudimentary. I can probably manage a minimal program that would work on a LAN, but having it work through the Internet is another matter.

[rush6432]

kskunk, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 2:45 PM, said:

rush6432, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 9:03 AM, said:

What is needed is a custom program that is taylored to the way these games communicate to speed things up a bit.

Curious programmers want to know... what kind of tailoring is necessary?

I imagine these games aren't very latency tolerant, because on a local link, they don't have to be.

Is latency the issue? If it's not latency, I'm drawing a blank on what it could be. Any program that goes UART to network to UART should work the same, except for the latency.

If it is latency, going over the internet could be a big challenge. I consider my home internet connection pretty good, but going out to a friend down the street is about 20ms round trip, which is longer than a screen refresh on NTSC. Going California to New York is 90ms, which seems well beyond the limit of a game not designed for internet play.

- KS

Doom has its issues as we all know already, the time it takes to move is rediculous. im talking maybe 1 fps. however with network speeds lowered through the source code the fps picks up a bit. not a ton but it does.

Aircars on the other hand seems to be playable, however player 1 (host) seems to take all the load on the jag and if player 1 moves... network errors occur. However player 2 can roam around like they were playing single player without network erros and ive been able to find player 1 in a game and it seems to play smoothly. I believe if the program used to tunnel can be taylored to look for these packets and know how to treat them, we can improve speed a little bit more. Battlesphre is unknown as i dont have 2 copies of this game.

it seems that the PC serial port settings in windows must mirror the settings that are on the tunneling program to get decent results. However, im not sure where im having issues. im guessing it has to be in the router.... or in the pc somewhere is where im getting the slowdowns. im using 1500 for the MTU value on the router and in the tunneling program a buffer size of 8192. if i use anything lower or higher it wont connect.

Over ethernet there should be no problems. My first guess would be the router that ive been using to test with...
I have another but no easy way to move around to it currently..

Kskunk, pm me if you want more details.

[rush6432]

Zerosquare, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 3:14 PM, said:

rush6432, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 9:03 AM, said:

I need someone who is familiar with windows and coding network programs. (serial and tcp/udp coding).

I can help with the serial communications part, but my skills in TCP/IP coding are rudimentary. I can probably manage a minimal program that would work on a LAN, but having it work through the Internet is another matter.

This would be the first step. if we can get it to play normally over LAN then we can figure out the internet portion shortly after.

[Tyrant]

rush6432, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 3:35 PM, said:

I believe if the program used to tunnel can be taylored to look for these packets and know how to treat them, we can improve speed a little bit more.

Given that there are only 3 networkable games (maybe more if you count the various revisions of aircars released (does the network traffic change between them? / are they compatible between versions?)) it would be entirely possible for the pc software to fake a low latency connection by caching the data transmitted, replying immediately with the last known copy, and only updating when it gets new info from the other player(s).

It would be a little more work, since the games protocols would have to be reverse engineered, but I can't imagine there are that many different types of packets being sent, so it shouldn't be too hard to analyse, especially since the code can be disassembled and looked at along side the serial dumps.

[Songbird]

Tyrant, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 5:04 PM, said:

Given that there are only 3 networkable games...

Don't forget about Ultra Vortek. I actually played that via two JagModems separated by about 5 miles back in the 1990s. Very cool experience long before Xbox Live became all the rage. Would be neat to see that game playable across the net, since it's built to work with a modem in the first place.

[Tyrant]

Songbird, on Mon Jun 27, 2011 8:09 PM, said:

Tyrant, on Sun Jun 26, 2011 5:04 PM, said:

Given that there are only 3 networkable games...

Don't forget about Ultra Vortek. I actually played that via two JagModems separated by about 5 miles back in the 1990s. Very cool experience long before Xbox Live became all the rage. Would be neat to see that game playable across the net, since it's built to work with a modem in the first place.

True, but that would require reverse engineering the protocol it uses to talk to the voice modem... I'm guessing it's just serial though, with the modem doing its magic on its own, so probably isn't toooo hard actually.

[Zerosquare]

Isn't there some info about it in the docs ? I vaguely recall something like this, but I probably skipped it because "hey, who has a modem anyways ?"

[Tyrant]

Zerosquare, on Tue Jun 28, 2011 4:59 AM, said:

Isn't there some info about it in the docs ? I vaguely recall something like this, but I probably skipped it because "hey, who has a modem anyways ?"

Well then what d'you know, there is... I too had skipped it for exactly that reason... but there's enough detail there by the looks of it to get ultra vortek working over ticipip if someone is up for it.

http://www.mediafire...Voice Modem.pdf

[rush6432]

There is always club drive source code that has modem code in it you can see how it works easily there.

Anyway. Progress is still slow on this. I've been extremely busy lately but i am still chipping away at this. I will let everyone know if something good comes of it.

[GroovyBee]

I might be able to help but I've got a pretty long project list as it is. If you can put together a specification down to serial packet contents (preamble, post-amble, packet length(s), checksums - that sort of thing) that would be a great help to any programmer who takes the project on.

[doctorclu]

rush6432, on Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:03 PM, said:

There is always club drive source code that has modem code in it you can see how it works easily there.

Anyway. Progress is still slow on this. I've been extremely busy lately but i am still chipping away at this. I will let everyone know if something good comes of it.

Always thought this could be fudged to work.

Over the internet Club Drive? That would be sweet!

[Jag_Slave]

Great work Rush6432! Excited for something to get started with this!