Faceball 2000 16 Players

Discussion of programming and development for the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color.
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Great Hierophant
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Faceball 2000 16 Players

Post by Great Hierophant »

Supposedly, Faceball 2000 can support sixteen players. I have heard conflicting reports about how this is supposed to work. The game definitely supports the 4-player adapter, it says so on the box.

I can imagine that you could physically attach multiple 4-player adapters in a daisy-chain layout to physically connect sixteen Game Boys. It would work like this :

Code: Select all

    B   D   F   H   J   L   N
    |   |   |   |   |   |   |
A - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - P
    |   |   |   |   |   |   |
    C   E   G   I   K   M   O
In this diagram, the letters are Game Boys, the numbers are 4-player adapters and the lines are link cables. I don't think it is supposed to work like this. Has anyone ever poked around into FB2K's code to get a semblance of how it is supposed to work? Maybe the developers took it out of the published game because it was something that was only supported using in-house development hardware.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Faceball 2000 16 Players

Post by rainwarrior »

I know the original MIDI Maze version had 16 players, because the protocol went through the 16 channels of the MIDI standard.

According to Wikipedia it did work on GameBoy too with 7 4-way adapters in series.
Sik
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Re: Faceball 2000 16 Players

Post by Sik »

Imagine having 16 people playing around in the same room (and having to be close, because of the cable length).
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koitsu
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Re: Faceball 2000 16 Players

Post by koitsu »

Sik wrote:Imagine having 16 people playing around in the same room (and having to be close, because of the cable length).
That's why it's called Faceball: with 16 players, your face is in someone else's balls.
Shonumi
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Re: Faceball 2000 16 Players

Post by Shonumi »

The game already had a low frame-rate in single-player mode. I wonder how that would translate via multiplayer.
Great Hierophant
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Re: Faceball 2000 16 Players

Post by Great Hierophant »

rainwarrior wrote:I know the original MIDI Maze version had 16 players, because the protocol went through the 16 channels of the MIDI standard.

According to Wikipedia it did work on GameBoy too with 7 4-way adapters in series.
According to one of the programmers, it required its own special daisy-chain adapter for more than four players :

https://web.archive.org/web/20100509163 ... pagne.html

If someone can analyze the code, then perhaps the adapter can be rebuilt.

According to this comment, if genuine, then 8 players was about as good as it got before the framerate tanked :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZq31JUYf8M
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