Dwedit's Board

Lemmy Koopa

Member

Registered: 2012-09-30

Posts: 13

Is Link Transfer dropped permanently?

Hi. I was wondering if Link Transfer will be dropped permanently in PocketNES or if you have any plans to put it back in someday.
A lot of the good 2 player NES games are simultaneous 2 player games, which where you will indeed need another controller.

I found Link Transfer to be a great solution for allowing 2 players. I just want to know for sure if it's dropped or not, in case I need to use an old version backup for Link play.

Last edited by Lemmy Koopa (2012-09-30 10:22:50 am)

Dwedit

Administrator

From: Chicago

Registered: 2004-12-12

Posts: 1,017

Website

Re: Is Link Transfer dropped permanently?

Link transfer got removed when I made PocketNES into a cartridge program instead of a RAM program, because RAM is extremely tight.
In general, there are two kinds of GBA programs.  Most are designed to run from a cartridge, and others are designed to run from the internal memory of the system, those are the so-called "Multiboot" programs.
Before, PocketNES was a multiboot program that also read ROMS off the cartridge.  The reason I went to a cartridge version of the program is so I could support compressed ROMS, because I needed all the RAM I could get to support that feature.

What I can do is put in a second copy of PocketNES that's built to run from RAM, then switch to that version when you use "Link Transfer" or "Go Multiboot".  The maximum ROM size might be only 192k though, so you can't play 256k sized games in this way.

You don't necessarily need to use Link Transfer to play a multiplayer game, any way to get the two systems to have the same game running on them will work.

By the way, "Go Multiboot" is much better to use than "Link Transfer".  "Go Multiboot" gets the emulator all ready to go without any slow link transfer time.  You can pull out the cartridge right after doing that.  Except for the Game Boy Player, you can't eject cartridges on that system, so you'd need to use Link Transfer for that.

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"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."

Lemmy Koopa

Member

Registered: 2012-09-30

Posts: 13

Re: Is Link Transfer dropped permanently?

The ability for compressed ROMs is a pretty good feature though. I fit 349 ROMs on my cart without capping 32MB.

Is there no way to send a RAM copy of PocketNES and the game from a ROM version of PocketNES via Link Transfer?

If you're talking about using the old version of PocketNES and building a copy of it to run from RAM, I already did that, or do you mean you could make a build of a RAM version of the latest PocketNES?

Dwedit

Administrator

From: Chicago

Registered: 2004-12-12

Posts: 1,017

Website

Re: Is Link Transfer dropped permanently?

I was talking about making a new build of the current version of PocketNES, but for multiboot.  I would stick that inside a regular build, so it can load that copy into RAM when it does Link Transfer or Go Multiboot.  It would probably eat up about 50k of ROM space, but you'd get those features again.

But first things first, CKY-2K on PocketHeaven informed me that Super Mario 3 crashes after playing it for 20 minutes, gotta fix that first.

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"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."

Lemmy Koopa

Member

Registered: 2012-09-30

Posts: 13

Re: Is Link Transfer dropped permanently?

Ahah, well that's me, just thought this was an appropriate place for me to post this. Do what you need to do.