I heard there was a link cable for the Genesis that would let you link two Sega Genesis consoles up to play two players on two tvs. Anyone know how to program a game to use that cable, I hear only 1 game officially used it.
Also as a kind of related question, because I know nothing about this cable, would it be possible to use this cable to make a Genesis at as a coprocessor to another?
the cable is for 4bits at a time parellel bidirectional transfer, and i think it is wired so that it can create CPU interrupts too.
The bandwidth is low enough that you aren't going to be able to get much useful stuff going for any coprocessing tasks.
So I'm assuming it can be used to create an abstraction comparable to Game Link on the original Game Boy, sending a stream of bytes back and forth. But how close will any two Genesis consoles be in clock rate? Is it like the Game Boy line, whose oscillator is so cheap that you can expect two systems to fall 0.1% out of sync over time, requiring the faster machine to wait a frame occasionally to let the slower one catch up?
And does it work even on a Genesis 3? Between my cousin and myself, one of us has an original Genesis, the other a Genesis 3.
If Catapult's documentation on the XBand is any useful, two consoles may drift by about a whole frame over the lapse of a minute. Not like this matters much anyway, even if the two systems have the same exact speed you'd still have problems if they do vblank at wildly different times =P
The cable link mentioned here would be the one used by Zero Tolerance, btw. The game is too much of a stress on the 68000 to have it render graphics for two players, so they resorted to have it play on two different consoles instead. Pretty awkward really, but on the other hand that makes it perfect for the Nomad (especially with its otherwise weird 2P port).
And yes, it should work with the model 3. The controller ports are pretty much the only safe thing across all variants (aside from emulated crap that can't even get Sonic 1 right).
Sik wrote:
Pretty awkward really, but on the other hand that makes it perfect for the Nomad (especially with its otherwise weird 2P port).
If only that worked...
Unfortunetly due to incompatibilites Sega designed into the Nomad portable game device, the cable will not work on the Nomad.
(spelling errors are theirs)
Dunno if anyone has actually tried it, though...
It works perfecttly on nomad, I even ran the game between two no problems, and I even tried 50 and 60Hz on different machines, and it took a while for the link to fail in such condition hahahaha.