I read in some of the “have” lists that people have made their own link cables… Is there a tutorial for this? Because I’ve always wanted to play 2-player Mario Tennis! 🙂

You won’t be able to, since no commercial games seem to have a link feature, a link cable is only useful with homebrewn games. Games that support it are Tic Tac Toe and 3D BattleSnake by DogP.
As soon as I get my cable working, I will add building instructions to the site, though.

KR155E

I, too, am still in the middle of working on my link cable. I just have the basic parts of it made, and have not done much with the wire configuration. There was a link that helped me get started with it. If I happen to find it, I’ll be sure to post it here. So keep checking back now and then.

As far as it not working for any of the commercial games, I can’t offer much info. As mine has yet to be tested for obvious reasons. I only know what I have read on the subject. However, I find it odd that a link cable was almost in production before the VB failed. But, without games already out that would support it. I guess I should not be too surprised, as Nintendo made many mistakes with this system.

With so many possible wire configurations (functional or not), maybe it’s possible that the proper config. has yet to be discovered. Keep in mind that this is a mere hypothesis of mine that has yet to be put to any kind of tests. A good example would be a 2-player old-school Gameboy cartridge. With a few of those games, the 2-player option would not even be visible at the start-up of a game unless it was connected to another Gameboy with the same cart in it.

Anyway, it’s just food for thought. I hope to get working on it again soon.

~:Sir William:~ (a.k.a. Opeth)

I could have sworn that Mario Tennis is a two-player game according to Nintendo. Has no one even tried hooking up two VB’s each with Mario Tennis? I read somewhere (Nintendo Power) that it would support the link cable when it came out (and it might have even said that on the box… I don’t have the box since mine was packaged in with my VB)

Here it is:

http://vr32.de/spiele/released/marios_tennis/box_u/index.e.htm

Or, translate this:

http://vr32.de/spiele/released/marios_tennis/box_j/index.e.htm

Sir William has a valid point, but there’s more to it than that. The number of combinations is vastly reduced when you consider 2 things:

1. That DogP’s cable works for homebrewn games.
2. There are only a few commercial games that even access the link port at all.

Since basic comunications works, it’s safe to assume that some part of the homemade cable is the same as the one a commercial game would be using.

I believe that DogP said, in #virtualboy, that he tried all combinations of the remaining wires, and MT (and the other game(s) that access the port) still didn’t offer 2-player mode.

It could be that a simple patch is required to unlock the mode. Or, the code accessing the port could just be some sort of debugging code. If you really care, it’s time to get your hands dirty by learning some v810 assembly and digging around in the code!

(Making a cable and two carts couldn’t hurt, either 😉

-RunnerPack

Nintendo sold the link cable through their telephone service…I got several game covers and a stand for free from Nintendo when mine broke, as well as an ac adaptor. This was way after the VB was discontinued, and I bought two at Toys R’ us for 12 bucks brand new. I didn’t bother with the link cable because I was under the impression that none of the games worked, if mario tennis did that’d be awesome since I have two VB’s and two mario tennis games.

-Rob

A long time ago, I bought some replacement VB parts from nintendo and tried to get a link cable too, and the official replay was “they were planned but never made”. But, hey, look at F-Zero X for N64…it was made before the 64DD was, right? But it had the ‘hooks’ in it to look for the additional hardware being present, and it added opened up the track designer capabilities then. Maybe we just haven’t hit the right link-cable configuration yet. Are there patents or schematics that we know of that would help?