Emulator matchmaking?

Some of you might know GGPO and/or Supercade, both of which are arcade emulators with a matchmaking service for playing Fighting games (mostly). Now, is there any equivalent service for playing Sega Genesis, SNES, or any other console? Could this be implemented as a plugin on popular emulators such as Fusion?

Fusion has netplay, but I've never tried it online, only locally. It would be nice if we had a service with the interface of Supercade, which has chat, and shows what games you want to play with people that might challenge you. Imagine doing co-ops of Streets of Rage at any time, with just a couple of clicks, or even playing fighting games, but that might be a little more challenging since it requires a better netcode optimization. I think GGPO is not open source, but who knows if they might want to lend their netcode to be applied to such project.

I'd like to hear some answers from the more technically savvy users, too. You guys might know how to program something like this.

Fusion netplay isn't good enough for online gameplay, the game quickly becomes unsynchronized between machines because all fusion does is send keypresses. Even locally it's not great, since the time periods the key is registered on each side differ a little which will cause the game to become unsynchronized eventually..

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Fusion netplay isn't good enough for online gameplay, the game quickly becomes unsynchronized between machines because all fusion does is send keypresses. Even locally it's not great, since the time periods the key is registered on each side differ a little which will cause the game to become unsynchronized eventually..

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I have to disagree - I've had many, many successful netplay sessions on every MD Sonic game for testing and racing purposes, and a few others now and again, probably averaging out to at least one a week over the last two years.

Sonic CD and Knuckles' Chaotix always seemed to get desynced (though the latter was fine last week when we tried again on the current version). The only time we would get desync on the MD games is if we were using different versions of Fusion - Fusion won't complain about this but will just quietly desync somewhere along the way.

From my own experience, I agree with Tiddles, we've played a lot of Yu Yu Hakusho online with 4 people playing all together and desyncs weren't frequent (in fact I can't remember one happening, only game freezes/initial connection issues). We'd talk about matches and the results always matched up, as opposed to fighting games on Kaillera where desyncs became really obvious. We only played using Fusion 3.64.

The main issue we ran into was input lag, which is basically unavoidable, but I've had some great low latency matches too with very little input lag. All of my matches have been with friends within the US, though. Worst I can remember was when we played with a friend who was playing with a shoddy wireless connection. Even then it wasn't too bad. He actually recorded some of those matches:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evr0ogfheQ0

Granted, that video doesn't tell you anything about how it felt input lag wise or if there were desyncs. :P But fun can certainly be had with Fusion!

As far as emulator matchmaking is concerned, I haven't checked it out yet but MAMEHub seems to be building a lot of steam:

http://blog.mamehub.info/
http://mamehub.proboards.com/

It supports MESS as well which means lots of console support, so that might be a nice way to get some Genesis games organized. You can also record videos with it using a built-in WebM encoder, so you can upload your play sessions straight to YouTube.

Another alternative is Final Burn Alpha with Kaillera. MAMEHub should be a much better option, but if it doesn't pan out then you could check that out. There's also a P2P Kaillera replacement DLL that makes online play much more bearable, unfortunately you can only use the P2P mode with 2 players (3 players+ will revert to "normal" Kaillera netcode) and you lose out on the typical Kaillera matchmaking abilities like the server list, server chat, and "game room" chat.

Recording videos doesn't say much, since both sides of the game could be different. I did the experiment, 2 laptops connected to different internet providers (via those USB thingies). Games got desynched FAST. Using proper wireless or ethernet wasn't as bad, but the games eventually got desynched. Streets of Rage 2 for example, the enemies would be on different places. My friend would be doing retarded shit on my screen and I'd be doing retarded shit on his screen because effectively we weren't playing the same game. Your opinion means nothing in this case.

EDIT: The same version of Fusion was used for the above tests.

I've tried to play with Fusion across the state a few times, each time both of us ended up on entirely different levels and then the "online" sprite stopped moving entirely. For a while it was hilarious because the sprite kept doing really stupid things and we were voice chatting over ventrillo about it. It's a shame too, nothing would be better than online gaming on the Genesis.

It would be good if the Fusion emulator were to be updated with GGPO netcode. That would be the day...

"Fusion 3.65 GGPO Edition"

I imagine they would get desynchronized fast with USB Wi-Fi cards, most of those things are pretty awful when it comes to a stable connection. And I know the video doesn't show anything significant (I even said that below it if you cared to read :( ), I just wanted to share it for fun.

But if you pay attention to the stats at the end you'll notice we played a significant amount of matches and we've had much longer play sessions in the past. No desync complaints on 3.64, and it becomes pretty clear when desync occurs in a fighting game (I.E. the "retarded shit" as you put it).

Maybe the people I played with just generally have better setups, or there's something inherently better about how Fusion handles scenarios of 3 or more people. Because honestly I have not done much 2 player gaming through it except for a couple of test games of Contra: Hard Corps (which didn't desync but we didn't play very long either).

Were your tests conducted on 3.64? I'm not doubting your experience, but it sounds like there might have been other issues at play. You might also want to try "High Priority" mode on your Fusion clients to help ensure that no one's background processes could cause a desync. I never had to ask anyone I played with to do that, though. I just find it strange that we wouldn't desync for long fighting sessions if you found the issue to be common. But then again it could be a matter of Fusion handling 4P games better than 2P ones, which is weird but plausible I suppose depending on its implementation.

By the way, "your opinion means nothing"? That's a bit harsh, don't you think? :P I'm sorry that your play experience in Fusion was less than optimal. It's too bad that Kega Fusion doesn't support sending of save states to help rectify your issue. But with alternatives like MAMEHub and FinalBurnAlpha (or Gens) + some version of Kaillera, hopefully you've found something that worked. Apologies if I irked you with our positive experience, it's just that we've had nothing but good times playing Yu Yu Hakusho on Fusion so it surprises me to hear desyncs are rampant for others.

By "your opinion means nothing in this case" I mean "opinion means nothing in this case". It's not a matter of opinion. Kega's netplay is just poor. Even if you have had cases where it worked ok, that does not in any way change the fact that it's poor.
Games like Yu Yu Hakusho and Contra:Hard Corps desync less because one is a fighter (where everything is player controlled) and the other has fixed enemy placements and movements. So it's much less noticeable in those games.
Any game where enemies have what can be called an A.I will desync really fast.

We were playing beat-em ups, that must have been why they desynced so quickly.

Oh, right, sorry I read your comment wrong. :D And I see what you guys mean now, that makes a lot of sense since there's more of a random element going on. Thanks for the clarification!

I also might have been using Gens plus, but I can't remember (it's been over a year).

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

By "your opinion means nothing in this case" I mean "opinion means nothing in this case". It's not a matter of opinion. Kega's netplay is just poor. Even if you have had cases where it worked ok, that does not in any way change the fact that it's poor.
Games like Yu Yu Hakusho and Contra:Hard Corps desync less because one is a fighter (where everything is player controlled) and the other has fixed enemy placements and movements. So it's much less noticeable in those games.
Any game where enemies have what can be called an A.I will desync really fast.

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To back up my hundreds of successful Sonic runs, I just played a good chunk of Streets of Rage 2. No desync at all, as evidenced by the correctly timed anger at accidentally throwing each other. (We both did lots of stupid things on screen, but these were entirely caused by woeful gaming ability.)

I find it intriguing that you've had such a bad experience when I've had such a good one. From my point of view, I could say it's not a matter of opinion, Kega netplay works perfectly. But there clearly is a difference.