I was wondering if you could help me out with a possible project.

Is there a way to rewire several Game Boy link cables so you could link 6-8 original Game Boys together for gameplay, or has someone managed to accomplish this?

You guys some how managed to make a link cable for the Virtual Boy, so I figured you guys might know. 🙂

If there are any games that support 6-8 players(?), of course it’s possible.

Yeah, it can be done… there were actually a couple commercial games that allowed daisy-chaining of these: http://www.amazon.com/Gameboy-Four-Player-Adapter-Game-Boy/dp/B0001YYO0M . Faceball 2000 did up to 16 players, and Penguin Wars did up to 10 players.

DogP

Then to rephrase the question, how can I learn how to rewire (or daisychain as you put it) the cables so 8 Gameboys can be linked up at the same time? ASnd is there certain C coding that is require these hookups work for a homemade game?

DogP wrote
Yeah, it can be done… there were actually a couple commercial games that allowed daisy-chaining of these: http://www.amazon.com/Gameboy-Four-Player-Adapter-Game-Boy/dp/B0001YYO0M . Faceball 2000 did up to 16 players, and Penguin Wars did up to 10 players.

DogP

Faceball… not as much apparently. This showed up as a comment on Youtube, though I don’t know if you can really take it with a grain of salt…

davidnolte  (May 4, 2008)
I was the producer on this game. The comments on the framerate are a sore point for me…When we originally designed this game, it could handle up to 16 players using a custom-made token ring cable. The frame rate with up to about 8 players was pretty good, but sucked at 16… We were going to package the cables with the game, but Nintendo insisted we support their Satellite 4 player hub even though it was a piece of poo. Framerate dropped big time. Ah well, such is life.

Hence why the objective for now is 8.

I’ve never actually tried it, or written any linked code for the Gameboy, but I believe you just take one 4 Player Adapter (we’ll call it 4PA from now on), which has a plug and 3 ports, then plug another 4PA into each of those 3 ports. That gives 10 players (1+3+3+3 with 4 4PA boxes).

Normal 4P mode:
  --G
  |
G-x-G
  |
  --G

10P mode
       --G
       |
  -----x-G
  |    |
  |    --G
  |
  |    --G
  |    |
G-x----x-G
  |    |
  |    --G
  |
  |    --G
  |    |
  -----x-G
       |
       --G

Then of course you can plug more 4PAs into the next set, and so on as you want. I’ve never looked at the technical specs of these, so there may actually be an upper limit to how many can be plugged in… and I have no idea how you actually address each system.

If you wanted to make a custom token ring cable, that could also be done by hooking up Tx to Rx of the next system, and then either use the data, or retransmit it to the next system.

DogP

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I have info to contribute to this thread.

I too am trying to make Faceball 16-player a reality, but am struggling to get more than four copies to play nicely.

I’ve tried daisy-chaining 4-player adapters, both in a linear fashion (one plugging into the previous plugging into the previous…etc) and in the fashion indicated by DogP. Neither show any ability to link together.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100509163809/http://fb2k.retro-spect.ca/rchampagne.html

According to this page (an interview with one of the team members for Faceball 2000), they used a custom “special connector” that was intended to be packed in free with the game, but due to pressure from Nintendo the item was never released. However, they claim the game is still capable and that the functionality was never removed.

However, it does not seem to be doable using just the nintendo-made four player adapter. I think you will have to rebuild their custom link in order to get above 4 players.

koifish wrote:
I too am trying to make Faceball 16-player a reality, but am struggling to get more than four copies to play nicely.

I’ve tried daisy-chaining 4-player adapters…

There’s your problem. As can be read in the interview you linked, 5+ players can only be done with their special, unreleased daisy-chain cable. In networking, a daisy-chain is when the transmit (Tx) line of one device connects to the second device’s receive (Rx) line, then that device’s Tx connects to a third device’s Rx, and so on until the last device’s Tx connects back to the first device’s Rx, closing the chain into a loop. The software can then detect how many devices there are in the chain by seeing how long it takes a piece of information to get all the way around.

All you have to do is get one cable for every two GBs you want to connect, cut them in half, wire all the Tx/Rx lines in the daisy-chain (pin 2 -> pin 3), wire all the clock lines (pin 5) and ground lines (pin 6) together, and try it out. If you have a couple extra 4p adapters, you could even “hollow them out” (i.e. remove the CPU and junk from the PCBs) and make an 8-player setup without splicing any cables. Easy-peasy.

RunnerPack wrote:

koifish wrote:
…

There’s your problem. As can be read in the interview you linked, 5+ players can only be done with their special, unreleased daisy-chain cable…

Yes, you are indeed correct. As I pointed out, the article does indicate that their connector is needed for more than 4 players. I only wanted to mention the daisy-chaining of four player adapters to show that I have tried what is out there, and in particular for its popularity. The theory of daisy-chaining four-player adapters together is quite common online in discussion of this game (popular enough for the Faceball 2000 Wikipedia page to parrot it). Given its common appearance in conjunction with the game, I felt the need to address it. On that note, given that my tests of several different configurations of FPAs failed to produce the desired results, I feel my work was enough to put this theory to rest, and corroborate the information presented in that interview. If I get further with this then I’ll probably demonstrate what happens with different link configurations, if only for the sake of reporting thorough information on the subject, but for now I’m still on the trail of knowledge.

Fortunately I do have a ton of four player adapters (I found a pile of them at a used shop for cheap and, given I originally expected to be using many of them for this, I couldn’t pass them up), so sometime in the next month I should be able to get around to tinkering with one of them. Thanks for the heads-up on information, I admit I don’t know a lot about the link hardware but I now have an idea of what I have to accomplish.

Ah, okay, I misunderstood.

If you ever get around to it, I found some information that might be useful. On Jeff Frohwein’s “Dev’ers” site, he has a schematic of the four-player adapter (aka DMG-07) (see below), which may help you decide where to (dis)connect things.

Attachments:

1. 

   4play.gif
   

Apparently you can get more than five players on Faceball if you use the GBA link cables.
There’s a thread here:
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/forums/index.php?topic=19203.0

but the images no longer show up.

As a follow up, I actually found the guy who made that thread elsewhere (since I remember that I couldn’t seem to get in touch via that forum when I tried), and asked him about that experience, but never saw a reply detailing what he did. I’m curious too because I’ve tried gba link cables and never saw the game respond much. The one thing I witnessed was that on the other systems (not the player 1 system connected with the small purple plug but the others connected via grey plug), the gba screen would flash white and stay blank the whole time. It appeared to respond to the cable being in (that flashing behavior was unusual) but I couldn’t make anything of it. The one “main” unit just acted as if it was a single-player hookup. Compare to the four player adapter, which worked in that it would show on the title screen the number of connected systems, and then when you hit start, all systems would enter the menu. Also, the menu screen was synced between all systems (and any player could navigate the menu which could be pretty chaotic). I wasn’t able to get this behavior from gba cables, and he even had non-gba systems there (ie. Game boy color) which makes me question how he even connected them, given the plug differences would physically prevent a connection. My suspicion is that they were modified in some way, or that the linking wasn’t actually successful, but I withhold knowing for sure until I can talk to the guy about it.

I appreciate the pinout, I’m planning to start this within the next month, we will see how it goes.

Also an asude, I think the YouTube poster who mentioned the custom adapter might be on facebook, I did a little digging and I think it is the same David Nolte as is in both the YT post and the game credits. I wasn’t sure if I should reach out though, particularly as I don’t have a Facebook account, and getting random messages from new accounts is probably a warning sign to regular users

Just wanted to say that I’m working on a write-up of how Faceball 2000 works in multiplayer beyond four players. Wanted to mention that Penguin Wars actually doesn’t support 10 players at once, it only has a tournament mode that allows you to do the normal 1v1 matches with up to 10 entries in the tournament. You do not actually get 10 players concurrently.

Please include in your writeup that Faceball 2000 doesn’t support more than 4 players without aftermarket modifications. I know it’s famously known as the only game that supports daisy-chained 4-player adapters, but it doesn’t. It was planned to, but Nintendo rejected the idea of a modified 4-player adapter that supported chaining.

Everyone who has ever tried it using stock OEM equipment has failed. Only people who have used modified equipment have been able to play it.

I’m sure you know all this, but I chime in every time I see it discussed online, since the misinformation is really all over the internet.

Any update on this? I’ve been trying to get a 16-player game going for a while. I have all the games, gb and such.But I’m still in need a link cable that will work. Thx!