LAN Play in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on Wii

Posted: Sat May 05, 2012 6:35 am

This technically isn't GameCube-related, but since there's no Wii forum, I'll post this here.

For those of you who don't know me, I was involved with the GCARS-CS project about 5-6 years ago, which enabled Sonic and Smash Bros to play online on the GameCube. I've been tinkering with the Wii for a while, and last month I released a new version of my Wii tool, GeckoTunnel, which now enables LAN play of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the Wii. No online play yet, but I thought people here might be interested to know that there is some development going on in this area.

Here's a video of LAN play (two Wiis) in Sonic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2tU7V6nkA4

Before anyone asks, I don't have a time estimate for how long before online play is possible... but it's something I'm working on. Smile

Team XLink Moderator Joined: 27 Feb 2011 Posts: 1206

Sounds great !

Kai Beginner Joined: 05 Jul 2012 Posts: 2

I am definitely going to be using geckotunnel when the online capability comes out. Keep up the good work, looking forward to this!

PSP Guru Joined: 07 Apr 2007 Posts: 2405

Looking good guys

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2012 8:02 am

GeckoTunnel 0.4.0 Beta is out.

https://veclabs.posterous.com/pages/geckotunnel

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle (USA version) is now playable online on the Wii. Support for other games is in the works. Lag and bandwidth usage are not optimal, I'll be improving those in the future. (Nothing in this beta should be construed as "complete", but it works well enough to be playable.)

Note that you'll need a USB Gecko adapter to use this. (The USB Gecko adapter is used for communication between the Wii and the PC-side tunneling program.)

@Xlink devs: it's a bit early since only one game is supported, but once GeckoTunnel supports a few more GameCube/Wii games it'd be cool to get it integrated with Xlink Kai. I recall that back in the GCARS-CS days both TheDaddy and l3laze were interested in having GCARS-CS work with Kai... I hope a similar interest would exist for GeckoTunnel? GeckoTunnel is relatively simple network-wise, the PC client just sends UDP packets to each network opponent's IP every frame (each opponent gets the same packet)... if the opponent was set to localhost on a port controlled by Kai, then Kai would receive the data, and (I assume) something could be rigged up to transport it via Kai. Let me know what you think the best course of action is. Smile

Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:21 am

GeckoTunnel 0.4.1 Beta is released.

https://veclabs.posterous.com/pages/geckotunnel

This release supports player multiplexing, which allows unlimited players to join a game regardless of how many players a game natively supports.

A video of my conference talk announcing the feature is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIkYJTvOlOc (go to 16:10).

A full video of the game round which is excerpted in that talk is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA04LW0vqQE

Still working on adding support for more games; for now it's still only Sonic.

Kai Regular Joined: 26 Feb 2013 Posts: 114

This software looks pretty promising! If you can get Team Xlink to collaborate with you, and get this running over Kai, that would be amazing <3. looks like I might be picking up a USB gecko ASAP. First I need to pay off all my debt though lol.

I know of a shop that still sells these devices but idk if it's okay to post it here. I don't wanna seem spammy or anything. Also the shop in question also sells some other types of modding gear.

If a mod/admin replies to this and says it's okay to post, I will post the link here in a reply.

Kai Beginner Joined: 28 Feb 2013 Posts: 4

wii games actually support lan mode? or is this some other type of online mode?

Kai Regular Joined: 26 Feb 2013 Posts: 114

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is actually a GCN game, NOT a wii game. Somehow biolizard has found a way to utilize the lan functionality of the GCN (on a Wii, in GCN mode) using the USB gecko and some special software. This is pretty sweet imo and it could have a lot more potential if more people get involved with tweaking this exploit to work with Xlink Kai (of course for GCN games only).

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that there aren't any actual Wii games that are compatible with lan play, out of the box AT ALL. This would make utilizing Xlink Kai in Wii mode far more difficult. Imo it might be possible if Xlink could act as an emulator for Nintendo's (or w/e third party developer(s) who made the game in question) official servers for online play. If someone is going to try to pull off using Wii games over Kai, this would be the best possible "attack route" that I can think of.

Posted: Sat Apr 13, 2013 9:28 am

nextgenrules wrote:

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is actually a GCN game, NOT a wii game. Somehow biolizard has found a way to utilize the lan functionality of the GCN (on a Wii, in GCN mode) using the USB gecko and some special software. This is pretty sweet imo and it could have a lot more potential if more people get involved with tweaking this exploit to work with Xlink Kai (of course for GCN games only).

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that there aren't any actual Wii games that are compatible with lan play, out of the box AT ALL. This would make utilizing Xlink Kai in Wii mode far more difficult. Imo it might be possible if Xlink could act as an emulator for Nintendo's (or w/e third party developer(s) who made the game in question) official servers for online play. If someone is going to try to pull off using Wii games over Kai, this would be the best possible "attack route" that I can think of.

GeckoTunnel will work fine with Wii games in principle. It's not using any native LAN functionality from the GameCube; it's entirely a custom protocol I developed. The main things necessary for Wii game support are:

(1) Change a few numbers in the USB Gecko driver, since the Wii and GameCube have different addresses for the memcard bus. (This is easy.)
(2) Deal with the more complex control schemes used by many Wii games. (Wiimote is more difficult to work with than GCN pad.) Not particularly difficult, but takes some work.
(3) Generalize the script format so that it works with the Wii's more aggressive memory management. Sonic Adventure 2: Battle stores most of its data in global variables, or on pointers which rarely change. Most Wii games use very aggressive memory management, with some crazy data structures. I need to make GeckoTunnel able to automatically find the variables in those data structures. This has been partially working since December, I just haven't had time to finish it.

So yeah, basically GameCube is easier due to (2) and (3), which is why I did it first as a proof of concept, but there's no fundamental reason this can't work on a Wii.

(Sorry for the delayed reply, for some reason I didn't get an e-mail notification from the forum.)

Kai Regular Joined: 26 Feb 2013 Posts: 114

Sorry, its been forever. I didn't realize you replied, I've been away from. Xlink for quite a while. Any updates on this? Also thanks for all your hard work!