{"id":8877,"date":"2017-08-23T06:45:04","date_gmt":"2017-08-23T14:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/08\/23\/news-2650\/"},"modified":"2017-08-23T06:45:04","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T14:45:04","slug":"news-2650","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/08\/23\/news-2650\/","title":{"rendered":"A Modder Brings Multiplayer to the Virtual Boy, Nintendo\u2019s Most Anti-Social Console"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/video-images.vice.com\/articles\/599ca7165ebfc0425809c579\/lede\/1503439071883-Virtual_Boy_with_stand_-_supine.jpeg\"\/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Credit to Author: Jason Johnson| Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n<p> Tennis is a game designed for two players, but the Virtual Boy, Nintendo&#8217;s much maligned stereoscopic system, was a solo experience. <\/p>\n<p> From the Nintendo Entertainment System to the Switch, every other Nintendo console supported two-player modes, but the Virtual Boy, an isolating gadget that you stuck your face into like a virtual reality headset, never got a multiplayer mode, despite <i> Mario Tennis<\/i> being one of its few notable games. <\/p>\n<p> That is until last week, when a modder released a two-player patch for <i> Mario Tennis. <\/i>With the patch and two Virtual Boys with two copies of the game connected via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.projectvb.com\/linkcable.html\" target=\"_blank\">a standard Category 5 cable<\/a>, a two-player mode for the system is finally here. <\/p>\n<p> As mentioned on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.planetvb.com\/modules\/newbb\/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6804\" target=\"_blank\">the Planet Virtual Boy forums<\/a>, the multiplayer patch allows for head-to-head competition in singles and doubles matches. Playing doubles on the same team, however, is a work in progress.<\/p>\n<div data-iframely-id=\"qpeFKNz\" class=\"article__embed article__embed--iframely\">\n<div style=\"left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;\" data-iframely-smart-iframe=\"true\"><iframe  src= width=\"100%\" height=\"420\" frameborder=\"0\" ><\/iframe> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p> Fans have always speculated this multiplayer mode could happen, ever since a listing for the GameLink Cable appeared in <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/Virtual_Boy_Instruction_Book_1985_Nintendo\" target=\"_blank\">the short-lived device&#8217;s instruction manual<\/a>. Sadly, the Virtual Boy went bust before the cable made it to market. <\/p>\n<p> &#8220;I wanted to find out once and for all if there was any multiplayer code left,&#8221; Virtual Boy hobbyist developer Martin Kujaczynski, aka M.K., told me in an email.<\/p>\n<p> The trouble was knowing where to look. <i> Mario Tennis<\/i> is written in around 30,000 lines of assembly code. Discovering a few lines of multiplayer code in that ancient tome would be like finding a needle in a haystack. To help him hone in on the right areas, he used a modified emulator to rule out extraneous data like music and graphics. This narrowed the search down to 3000 lines, making it more like finding a needle in an unfamiliar Wal-Mart.<\/p>\n<p> Sure enough, he saw what looked like instructions for the Virtual Boy&#8217;s link port. With the aid of the homemade cable, all he had to do was get the code up and running.<\/p>\n<p> &#8220;The time consuming part was figuring out what the unused code does and how to use it,&#8221; said Kujaczynski.<\/p>\n<p> Because of his efforts, playing the Virtual Boy is a little less lonely, although its migraine-red color palette may give you a headache. But now you can have headaches with your friends, as long as they like tennis. So far, <i> Mario Tennis<\/i> is the only game Kujaczynski has found multiplayer code in, and he&#8217;s searched through other likely candidates. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/3kkpb5\/a-modder-brings-multiplayer-to-the-virtual-boy-nintendos-most-anti-social-console\" target=\"bwo\" >https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/video-images.vice.com\/articles\/599ca7165ebfc0425809c579\/lede\/1503439071883-Virtual_Boy_with_stand_-_supine.jpeg\"\/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Credit to Author: Jason Johnson| Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Friends not included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10643,13328,10378],"tags":[1445,13336,4357,13979,12990],"class_list":["post-8877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-motherboard","category-security","tag-gaming","tag-m-o-d","tag-nintendo","tag-virtual-boy","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}