Faceball 2000 16 Players

[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.

[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]

Imagine having 16 people playing around in the same room (and having to be close, because of the cable length).

[koitsu]

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]

The game already had a low frame-rate in single-player mode. I wonder how that would translate via multiplayer.

[Great Hierophant]

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

[TakuikaNinja]

The year is 2025, and today is a nice day. People have finally figured out 16-player Faceball 2000.

"My 2 Year Journey to Solve the 30-Year Myth of Faceball 2000 | SSFF" by Stop Skeletons From Fighting: https://youtu.be/y2AG-gAuS-U
"How I Fixed the Legendary 16-Player Game Boy Game" by Zarithya: https://youtu.be/d9dVVRv70aA

tl;dw:

• A custom link cable adapter (containing a buffer for the serial clock signal) is required to daisy-chain that many consoles. Nintendo's 4-player link cable adapters will not work.
• The game had a bug (off-by-one error in player ID assignments) which limited the max player count to 15. It also crashes when playing smaller maps due to the lack of spawn points.
• A hack has been made to properly handle 16 consoles, support SGB, and support GBC colourization + double clock speed, among other fixes/tweaks: Faceball 2000 DX
• 16-player games (and 15-player on the original game) have been successfully played as a result.

[Pokun]

So the unreleased custom Faceball adapter was basically just a Y-cable that takes the data in via SI on the first connector and sends the data out via SO on the second connector into the next Gameboy's SI via its first connector and this goes on with any number of Gameboys until completing the ring in the first Gameboy's SI, first connector. So that when the data comes back to the first Gameboy it contains all the data for all the Gameboys, similar to a midi ring.
Though as was discovered the Y-cable was probably not entirely without components and had most likely a buffer (like a 74HC541 that Zari used) to keep the SC signal (serial clock) within the specified voltage levels (that's probably the adapter Henk Rogers suddenly seemed to remember in the interview).

The GBA link cable ring partly worked only because it connects SO on the first end to the SI on the second end while the SO on the second end goes to the SO on the hub on the middle of the cable (SI on the second end is unused and grounded).
Connecting two GBA cables into each other's hub and two GBAs will basically make it work like the GB/GBC link cable (SI to SO both ways). By using 3 or more cables the Faceball ring is formed, but as the GBA cable lacks the buffer it will crash a lot with more than 8 players.

This also sounds to me that two GBA link cables connected together with two GBAs should work for linking with GB/GBC games since it connects each SI with each SO.


It's just great to see that they built 16 flashcarts in order to test the bug-fix for 16 players to work on real hardware.


Have a nice day!