Uzebox Forums

I've recently thought about having a simple communication channel between two uzeboxes. That way we could make games for two screens, e.g. racing games.
To have a simple standard which is compatible with all Uzeboxes already out there, we could declare one of the SNES connectors as the communications connector. Just cross-over clock and data lines and there we go. At the start both consoles have to synchronize each other so they have the vertical blanking nearly at the same time to make sure they are in each other's listening window. Any comments?

Hi sounds like it could work???? how would you go about it??? maybe tieing the two sd card slots wired together n hav one card with the game feeding /runing the two uzeboxs? And then hooking up one nes controller to the two of them ??? And then put the two S video out puts to two tvs ??

Hi Janka

This sounds really interesting, so you plan for the 2nd Uzebox to be like a slave device like multiple xbox 360 can be used to play Forza Motorsport kind of scenario?

Whats the possibility of multi-player via this kind of like a controller port mini LAN?

Either way. look forward to reading more about this idea as it develops - anything that broadens the Uzebox's horizons is always most welcome


Cheers

Roukan / Jim

Why not simply use the serial port? It's made for that.

Mast3rbug

Hey Janka,

Clever idea, using the crossed clock/latch you mentioned should work very easily. Though I can see a slight issue with requiring two TVs side by side!

Why not simply use the serial port? It's made for that.

Because it was not exposed on all Uzebox models (fuzebox, avcore & Euzebox). SNES controller ports are the only "common" interface to all versions.

mast3rbug wrote:Why not simply use the serial port? It's made for that.

As uze wrote, it's usually not exposed to the outside. Using the ISP or SDcard connector is the other possiblity, but that means opening the case (if there is one). These things are all straightforward to implement but may give problems later when actually connecting some random uzeboxes. The SNES connector is always there.

Roukan wrote:This sounds really interesting, so you plan for the 2nd Uzebox to be like a slave device like multiple xbox 360 can be used to play Forza Motorsport kind of scenario? Whats the possibility of multi-player via this kind of like a controller port mini LAN?

Not really master/slave as both boxes have to run the same whole game logic to make it work. If there was a racing game, the channel can be used to transfer the status of the vehicle (position and so on) to the other box. The idea is to have both machines having a mirrored state of such data, which is updated on each frame.

I've been for the controller port idea for a long time. Certainly a link cable would be possible, but even other external communications. Anyways for a networked first person shooter that used this method well, check out http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread ... e-Tutorial