Kaillera Server for Amiga.org

[motorollin]

Claw22000 wrote:
not many people taking advantage of the multilayer abilities of A1200.

Does Kaillera work with a real Amiga then?

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moto

[motorollin]

I guess since this works with WHDLoad games, what WinUAE is actually doing is capturing all the mouse/joystick/keyboard events, sending them to the other player's WinUAE which decodes them, and then simulates the corresponding player's mouse/joystick/keyboard events. Surely this could be done with hardware. Something like this maybe:



The red lines represent player 1's joystick movements and the blue lines player 2's. The "Kaillera box" passes the player's own joystick movements straight through to the Amiga's joystick port. It also somehow encodes them and communicates them, through the network, to the second player's "Kaillera box". This decodes the joystick movements and outputs them to the player 2 joystick port.

It's totally hardware-based. As far as the Amiga is concerned, there is a real joystick plugged in to the port.

Could something like that work?

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moto

[motorollin]

AJCopland wrote:
That can't be all that its doing though, otherwise the lag  between the two machines would cause them to become hopelessly out-of-sync quite quickly.

If the messaging was instantaneous, i.e; quicker than a single clock tick of the cpu. Then you wouldn't have to worry about the input drift differences between machines. But in practice communication isn't instantaneous.

Ahh, so the other player would not respond immediately due to latency of the communication, so what is happening on one Amiga might not reflect what is happening on the other. Is that what you mean?

AJCopland wrote:
Its possible to overcome it of course. The software does after all.

Presumably the software can synchronise the two emulators so that what happens on one precisely represents what is happening on the other. I don't see how that could be achieved on a real Amiga without changes either to the hardware, and/or the software. Perhaps WHDLoad could be modified in some way to send/receive the required information to keep the games in sync.

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moto

[motorollin]

I've got loads of multi-player WHDLoad games on my A1200, but I haven't got WinUAE set up. I could try to run it in Parallels but I don't know how well it would run. I'll give it a go though and let you know!

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moto

[motorollin]

Ok, just tried WinUAE Kaillera version in Parallels and it was, unsurprisingly, awful. I tried XTR and after two frames, the computer cars were already gone :lol: Shame I don't have a Windows machine to try this out! :-(

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moto

[motorollin]

@Claw22000
But how would existing software know that it is supposed to send its keyboard/joystick/mouse events to the other machine and listen for events coming back?

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moto

[motorollin]

Claw22000 wrote:
The PC would be handling all the TCP/IP stuff. Amiga serial--> PC serial. PC --> internet. Running tunneling software of course.

You can do that already. I've done it using the Mac software Multicom. It bridges between combinations of TCP server, TCP client and serial port.

- P1 Amiga would connect to Serial->USB->Mac
- P1 Mac runs Multicom bridging serial port to TCP server
- P2 Mac runs Multicom bridging TCP client (connected to P1 Multicom) to serial port
- P2 Amiga connected to Serial->USB-Mac

I have done this, but not with Amigas. I have no idea how well it would work considering latency etc, and of course it would only work at all with games which are designed to use a serial port for multiplayer. Something built in to WHDLoad to enable all multiplayer games to use the serial port would provide a solution.

Claw22000 wrote:
Has any one tried the server yet?

Bloodline and I were going to, but I don't have a Windows box and UAE is too slow under Parallels :-(

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moto