Playing Neo Geo games online against real live humans

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I'm trying to get a hold of SNK corporate offices about a new invention of mine. The invention is a way to turn every game for any particular system, (since this is a Neo Geo forum, let's talk about the Neo Geo) into a head-to-head online version of that game. This works without programing any specific online code for a specific game. The secret is to beat a 16 ms ping time for a 60 frame/second game. Luckily I know of a connection with that low of a ping time. Bandwidth is not an issue because a 2 player game takes 1.2-2 kb per second.

I've discussed this with other classic gaming companies. Both Atari and Sega say if I can demonstrated working with an unaltered ROM, they'll license it. One of them said I'm crazy but will believe it when they see it, the other may consider funding me by the end of the week.

I found a company who can build a pair of prototype devices for UP TO $17,000 (may be less) I'm just looking or some funding. Maybe if SNK or SNK fans fund it, I an make it first for Neo Geo.
 

Lemony Vengeance

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I'm trying to get a hold of SNK corporate offices about a new invention of mine. The invention is a way to turn every game for any particular system, (since this is a Neo Geo forum, let's talk about the Neo Geo) into a head-to-head online version of that game. This works without programing any specific online code for a specific game. The secret is to beat a 16 ms ping time for a 60 frame/second game. Luckily I know of a connection with that low of a ping time. Bandwidth is not an issue because a 2 player game takes 1.2-2 kb per second.

I've discussed this with other classic gaming companies. Both Atari and Sega say if I can demonstrated working with an unaltered ROM, they'll license it. One of them said I'm crazy but will believe it when they see it, the other may consider funding me by the end of the week.

I found a company who can build a pair of prototype devices for UP TO $17,000 (may be less) I'm just looking or some funding. Maybe if SNK or SNK fans fund it, I an make it first for Neo Geo.


sounds like a great kickstarter to me :D
 

NeoGeoNinja

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SO, am I reading into this wrong, but are you suggesting creating a device for the existing NeoGeo console (or/and MVS) that somehow interfaces with it allowing for 2P online play?

Like, something that sits intermediately between the cart slot and the cartridge for example (like a converter would) or a physical modification to the console itself?

Colour me intrigued...
 

ViolentStorm

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You could be on to something there, it would interesting to see if that could be implicated.
 

Mr Bakaboy

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My interest is peaked and if it works I would be possibly buying it depending on who has it. The one thing I want to know is does this somehow cause less ping time between parties then say an xbox 360? Cause I have started a connection between 2 xboxs online in the same room and internet and never seen a ping close to 16 m/s. If your invention can make a decent connection on 100 m/s (maybe not 60 frames per second but close) I can see how good it could be, but a 16 m/s connection seems pretty limited unless the system itself is somehow more efficent.
 
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My interest is peaked and if it works I would be possibly buying it depending on who has it. The one thing I want to know is does this somehow cause less ping time between parties then say an xbox 360? Cause I have started a connection between 2 xboxs online in the same room and internet and never seen a ping close to 16 m/s. If your invention can make a decent connection on 100 m/s (maybe not 60 frames per second but close) I can see how good it could be, but a 16 m/s connection seems pretty limited unless the system itself is somehow more efficent.

That's because you're interacting with the Xbox Live network for gamertagas and other administrative informaton. The problem with Xbox live is it uses power to make up for speed. Network traffic naturally take a disorganized route, as any ping test will tell you, because different people own different parts of the internet, and different companies have arrangements with different other companies of how they transfer data. But if you had a private gaming network whose express purpose is to shave milliseconds off ping time down from 100 ms for a 200 km trip to 1 ms then it could be done. Remember the speed of light is 300,000 km/s which is 300 km/ms. Remember the reason the speeds don't indicate under 1 ms speeds is beuase the network was designed to get you there, not shave milliseconds. Back when Arpa Net was invented, it didn't mater whether the missile launch codes got from Washington to Los Angeles in 1 ms or 1000 ms. The point is if Kansas City got nuked, the signal wouldn't die at Kansas City. There were no commercial tele-games at the time, they didn't anticipate the advent of 60 frame/second remote networked computer and video gaming.

I talked to a couple people at Xbox Live, they said higher speeds make networking possible. But if ping times were under 10 milliseconds, you can do live joystick feeds and update it every 60th of a second. A Neo Geo has 4 buttons, 4 directions (with diagonals being combinations of one vertical and one horizontal bit.) With 2 special buttons, you have 10 bits/player/cycle. Sine the most a Neo Geo can do is two players at one machine then it's 20 bits/cycle. If the machine CONTROLLED at 60 frames per second (not necessarily displayed but controlled) then that is 1200 bits/second which is 1.2k which fits under dial up. The only reason you need speeds in the megabit range is becuase the games stores up previous frames, computes possibilities based on an artificial intelligence playing for a remote human, and if anywhere the controls are "wrong" (between the AI guess and the actual events) you will have skating or a jump-cut when there is a difference. If you've ever noticed a target you're aiming at "pop" out of there before you pull the trigger, that's because the computer predicted your opponent, whiffed and instantly corrected the record, including filling in the gaps in between. At 100 ms you're always going to be 3 frames late in a 30 frame/second game. That's why you ned high bandwidth to make up for poor ping times. Try an Ethernet connected setup between 2 computers with all external connetions shut down meaning completely choked off memainig physically disconnect the wireless adapter, and see if the ping time is under 16 ms then.

By the way, Smaller ping numbers are better. 60 frames / second inverted as a reciprocal is 1 second/60 frames = 1000 milliseconds/60 frames = 16 milliseconds/frame.

And no artificial intelligence acting as a temporary proxy for a human means ANY 2 player game can be made online, because you're doing live joystick streams in real time. If you were to make a generic server without using a low ping connection, you'd either have to pause the game until the network caught up or you're in pure action mode. Playing a reactionary game would cause you to "skate" or have a 3-6 frame delay to your actions. That's why the only 2 solutions are the old way, program a game to specifically work with a high ping network, or the new way make a low-ping network. The disadvantage of the first is you have to have programmers think like users and update the game when someone finds a circumvention. Which means you have only so many man hours of working online games so only the more poplar ones get remade. With my system every game no mater how great or obscure gets turned online.
 
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Pope Sazae

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What type of connection are you talking about though? Just based on physical infrastructure around America you are going to have to deal with packet loss, different standards of hardware, etc. Unless you are talking about creating some new system based on ARCNET. I'm really curious to hear exactly what your proposal is.
 
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Well I called one company, Atari, they said their classic system and game rghts will be sold on auction in May. So it's up to the new owners of this storied classic powerhouse. Let's hope they want to own a game company with a lot of history and will want to exploit it. My contact person will bring it up to the new owner if the new owner doesn't specifically reject its retro history.

I'm also trying Konami, who now owns Hudson, which owned the rights to the Turbo Grafx 16 system back then in association with NEC. I think NEC sold their interest back to Hudson before Konami bought them. I sent 2 or 3 emails, but the contact person changed in between those 2 or 3 times.

Anyone knows who owns 3DO?
 

jesesfbi

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Well I called one company, Atari, they said their classic system and game rghts will be sold on auction in May. So it's up to the new owners of this storied classic powerhouse. Let's hope they want to own a game company with a lot of history and will want to exploit it. My contact person will bring it up to the new owner if the new owner doesn't specifically reject its retro history.

I'm also trying Konami, who now owns Hudson, which owned the rights to the Turbo Grafx 16 system back then in association with NEC. I think NEC sold their interest back to Hudson before Konami bought them. I sent 2 or 3 emails, but the contact person changed in between those 2 or 3 times.

Anyone knows who owns 3DO?
3DO that is interesting to see who owns it. I thought Panasonic did now but I could be wrong

and you have a interesting idea here :)
 
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Pope Sazae

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Using Sprint Direct Connect / AT&T or Verizon push-to-talk modified for data.

Would you be trying to get on their frequencies or just modifying the technology over a different spectrum? Getting into those frequencies isn't cheap and the FCC usually has some oversight on all of those.
 
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I don't know. I guess this would be a special application of existing Push-to-talk technology. I should be able to use existing frequencies. I know that you can send analog squelches like a dial up modem and get speeds of 33k. So at worst it will be dial-up speeds. But the Neo Geo uses 1.2 kb/s + timestamp and random number data. It would be like a dial-up modem tying up a phone line. Whether you use it for data or voice, it's the same principal. Also you ned a traditional network to establish a link between you and your opponent because direct connect numbers shouldn't be shared. This is where push-to-talk should be pushed. That one advantage the web will never have.

Would 90 ms have made a difference on 9/11? Most likely no, but if it did, it would be FAR more important than playing a 2600 game online. But I asked Sprint what a 9/11-type busy traffic day would be like if game data was competing against EMS/Police/Fire/Military traffic for bandwidth. It would increase the ping time for a 300 km trip from 1.1 ms to 1.5 ms. If this gets big enough, the FCC could designate certain PTT channels Emergency only and the rest can freely be used for both EMS and gaming sort of like how CB channel 9 is used by the highway patrol or 911 is the emergency hotline.
 
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Aubrey123

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This is really interesting, looking forward to reading about any progress you make. Good luck with realising your idea!
 
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Is there any news on this? I swear, this forum seems to come up with the craziest ideas… :D

Are you the sega.com forum moderator? He/she said the exact same thing and gave me lifetime ban. But other people at Sega corporate are more willing to listen. Also most of these crazy ideas are mine.
 

Jonny l3lanka

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Are you the sega.com forum moderator? He/she said the exact same thing and gave me lifetime ban. But other people at Sega corporate are more willing to listen. Also most of these crazy ideas are mine.

Why would you get a ban??? Anyway please keep us posted.. your idea sounds ground-breaking!!!
 
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Why would you get a ban??? Anyway please keep us posted.. your idea sounds ground-breaking!!!
The Sega.com moderator said "we don't deal in crazy." I was not dissing anyone or any company, I wasn't using any cuss words. I even said that the traditional network still has some uses. I'm just rethinking the obsession with bits/second and not with milliseconds/kilometer. It's like having a truck lane (DSL,Cable, Fiber) and a motorcycle lane (Direct Connect). Those Kamikaze motorcycles can go over 100 miles an hour, but can only carry one passenger. If you carry one passenger (less than 33k that has to be instantly reacted to) you'd be faster taking the motorcycle but if you're moving multiple cars to the same destination (game file downloads in the gig size range ) the truck lane is better. P.S. I live in America. I just use the term km/ms because the number of the speed of light is a lot easier to remember and easier to compute in km/ms not miles/ms. Speaking of which why does he card game Mille Bornes (at least the American version) insist those are mile markers when a 50 MPH speed limit doesn't make sense in the city but a 50 km/h speed limit does, and why is using all 100 MPH or less cards a safe trip but not 200 MPH, but 100 km/h is a safe speed but not 200 km/h makes much more sense. And, yes, I understand Mille Bornes is a metricization of the Parker Bros. card game, Touring that didn't carry over the metricization in the US, but the numbers and rules did carry over.
 

Jonny l3lanka

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The Sega.com moderator said "we don't deal in crazy." I was not dissing anyone or any company, I wasn't using any cuss words. I even said that the traditional network still has some uses. I'm just rethinking the obsession with bits/second and not with milliseconds/kilometer. It's like having a truck lane (DSL,Cable, Fiber) and a motorcycle lane (Direct Connect). Those Kamikaze motorcycles can go over 100 miles an hour, but can only carry one passenger. If you carry one passenger (less than 33k that has to be instantly reacted to) you'd be faster taking the motorcycle but if you're moving multiple cars to the same destination (game file downloads in the gig size range ) the truck lane is better. P.S. I live in America. I just use the term km/ms because the number of the speed of light is a lot easier to remember and easier to compute in km/ms not miles/ms. Speaking of which why does he card game Mille Bornes (at least the American version) insist those are mile markers when a 50 MPH speed limit doesn't make sense in the city but a 50 km/h speed limit does, and why is using all 100 MPH or less cards a safe trip but not 200 MPH, but 100 km/h is a safe speed but not 200 km/h makes much more sense. And, yes, I understand Mille Bornes is a metricization of the Parker Bros. card game, Touring that didn't carry over the metricization in the US, but the numbers and rules did carry over.

It doesn't matter that you got banned or that somebody thought you were crazy.. if your idea is good AND WORKS you will be succesful! So how long do you think until you have a working prototype of some kind? Will you be doing a kickstarter?
 

Jibbajaba

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Who banned you on Sega-16? Was it "Baloo"? He's a fucking asshole. That would be a great site if it weren't for the moderators. And some of the members.
 
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I thought he was talking about sega.com the official one?
It was sega.com and then through osmosis it went to Sega-16.com like they got a message I was poison. By the way, I complemented Sega by saying they had the numbers right that most games at the time would fit under 56k. But if you ever played Chu Chu Rocket online, the ping time was poor. Online you literally had to wait a second before your arrow was considered laid down. And it's basically an 8 bit per cycle per player game, cursor north south east and west, and tile north south east and west x 4 players or about 2 kb/s.
 

Pope Sazae

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Does the push to talk technology exist on the same frequencies used by Sprint, etc.? I don't want to be a downer on this but unless you plan on using the frequencies of say a HAM two-way but then you are restricted to the public bands not controlled by the FCC and thus filled with all the amateur using the VHF and UHF bands. Trying to get on what the big companies are using will require a ton of money to jump on the frequencies they paid for and then you have to deal with federal regulations. There is always the D-STAR protocol you could look at as it is mainly a branch of UHF and VHF bands but is much better for data. The only drawback is that it does require a server somewhere in the middle to handle all the communication and uses special TCP/IP gateway software.

I for one really want to see this happen but unless you decide to go over the public channels that HAM users are on you have a TON of work ahead of you and that's not figuring in the fact that public channels get crowded and it's not easy to have continuous communication when it's designed with a squelch method of info passing one way and then pausing and waiting for a return squelch.

I have not worked in networking of this type in a few years but I would gladly help you to see this project go through.
 
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Does the push to talk technology exist on the same frequencies used by Sprint, etc.? I don't want to be a downer on this but unless you plan on using the frequencies of say a HAM two-way but then you are restricted to the public bands not controlled by the FCC and thus filled with all the amateur using the VHF and UHF bands. Trying to get on what the big companies are using will require a ton of money to jump on the frequencies they paid for and then you have to deal with federal regulations. There is always the D-STAR protocol you could look at as it is mainly a branch of UHF and VHF bands but is much better for data. The only drawback is that it does require a server somewhere in the middle to handle all the communication and uses special TCP/IP gateway software.

I for one really want to see this happen but unless you decide to go over the public channels that HAM users are on you have a TON of work ahead of you and that's not figuring in the fact that public channels get crowded and it's not easy to have continuous communication when it's designed with a squelch method of info passing one way and then pausing and waiting for a return squelch.

I have not worked in networking of this type in a few years but I would gladly help you to see this project go through.

Sprint and other offer 1 monthly fee cell-to-cell direct connect. Direct connect is like cellular, it transmits via certain frequencies, and Direct Connect uses the same frequencies as cel phone. The only difference is that instead of connecting to the nearest phone/internet "onramp" it does straight from tower to tower. And because one company owns the entire network at that frequency, they don't have to negotiate with other parts of the network, which can lead to less than direct (sometimes even maze-like) routing. One obvious drawback (except from said cell phone company's perspective) to achieve a direct connection, you must be on the same network in a direct call, so whichever cell hone company goes with it will have an exclusive, or else you're going to have to connect to certain people on Sprint, others on At&T, and still others on Verizon. So either all your friends or a business arrangement have to communally decide which service you will use. So someone else will have to invent a way to cross connect. Cells phone normally can cross connect but for a Sprint to talk to an AT&T cell phone from your cell phone it goes from Sprint towers to the nearest onramp to the main phone network then from there goes to an AT&T cell pone offramp and then transmitted to their phone.

As for squelches, that's if you live in an area with 3G it has Dial-up Direct Connect speeds. 4G has 10x Dial Up speeds at low ping times. But 3G is pretty much anywhere.

Finally what to do if one player is on Sprint, another on AT&T, and a third on Verizon, and all want to play the same game against each other. There needs to be a Push-to-Talk converter service which links the networks, so you can play a 4-player game on a network using 3 opponents from 3 different direct connect services. Like EA's online gaming. If I'm right EA uses their own servers instead of Xbox Live, Playstation Network and Wii/3DS Online. If that's right then there should be cross-platform battles. I guess similar servers could be involved in cross service connections without losing more than 10 microseconds of ping. It would make it easier if the Netrogames communications code was universal to all carriers.

Do you need a separate phone line for dial up? No you don't. The pathways are owned by a certain company. Data squelches are understood my machines and it doesn't matter whether a call is voice or data it's just humans don't speak modem and computers don't natively speak English efficiently. As for "bleeding" direct connect is a private conversation only tuned in by people who are in the know. That's why you need a traditional network too to privately, for one matchup, transfer Direct Connect numbers. It just bypasses the traditional network.
 
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Addition
... and it's not easy to have continuous communication when it's designed with a squelch method of info passing one way and then pausing and waiting for a return squelch.
...

First of all the squelch method was a was just to show that dial up speeds are enough for most machines up to PS2. Second Dial Up is 33k two-way, or 56k one-way. Third 3G PTT is 33k and 4G PTT is about 500k with low ping connections.

Put it this way 33 kb/s is 500 bits/player/frame or 33 bits/millisecond If the first 3 milieconds is broadcasting out, you've got 13 ms to receive opponents data. Cut that to 5 ms if you want to send a confirmation signal during the second half of the broadcast.

By the way, I heard almost all Neo Geo games use 4 button or less (the last few might use a fifth), but most compilations deal with an 8-button layout and assume joypad, not stick. How do I configure the buttons in an SNK arcade arrangement for PS2 and Wii with B, C, and D in a row with the A to the left and below the B. I have a PS2 and Wii joystick in a "double SNK arrangement" What PS2 and Wii Classic function equals the A, B, C, and D of a Neo Geo?

And I know I'm not a hardcore SNK fan, because a) $500 systems and $150 games was too much new and b) I don't usually see Neo Geos in Thrift Stores. So, gawk at the Johnny-come-lately, who joined when the entire PS/Wii released collection cost less than one game back in the day. Speaking of Thrift stores, one time I found a Bally Astrocade system, Muncher, Blast Droids, 4 controllers, Incredible Wizard, Bally Basic, and about 7 other games for $5 plus tax for the whole ball of wax.
 
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