3-4 Way Link Cable?

[hydravien]

Hi All,

So I have managed to start a ti frenzy at my school... everyone has tetris, and a nifty little app me and a buddy made to solve quadratic equations...

So my question is, is it possible to splice some more connectors into the current ti link cable (these are ti 84+ and 83+ calcs but we all use the 83+ link) to work with multiplayer games such as ztetris and bomberkids? I doubt that it would be something that simple, but the reason i ask is that bomberkids has an option for 4 players.

Thanks,

Nick

[angel14995]

I always thought that the 4-way was only using 2 calcs. I know you can play Bomberkids 2-player on 1 calc, so 2 calcs=4 players.

And it would probably need to have you do some things, like create a router. I'm not the one to say anything much about hardware, but there are probably diagrams out there that explain a theoretical 4-way link.

[TheStorm]

DCS6 has the capability of doing this but no one has bothered to use it because it has very few uses and would be slower than normal linking which we all know is blazing fast .

[magicdanw]

[kermmartian]

[DarkerLine]

You wouldn't be able to play any already-existing games with a 3- or 4-way link cable, even if you made one; they don't have the code for it.

[hydravien]

thanks guys thats what i thought

[Liazon]

[tr1p1ea]

Timendus did something along those lines: http://kvince83.tengun.net/maxboard/viewto...?t=1694&start=0

[luby]

Well, if you had a 84+, couldn't you connect w/ the usb and the I/O port?

[Liazon]

true, but you'll have to test for the calc model and then 3 way would probably be the easiest (1 master + 2 slave calcs)

that'd be kind of cool though ^^ imho, there just should be more link cable multiplayer games.

[magicdanw]

I agree. Unfortunately, my latest calculator game (which I started two days ago) uses the link port for...something else

[SonicBoom95]

Why not just use the dual link ports on the 84 and up? You could link an infinite number of calcs with those.

[Liazon]

the problem is trying to sync all the calculators up together, which gets harder the more calculators get added to this network. This is partly because each calc can only talk to two other calculators. Even if you link them in a circle, to get info from one calc all the way to the calc on the other side of the ring, and then send a response back, it will generally take a lot longer, although I don't have as much experience w/ the link port.

Keep in mind that both the link port and the USB part iirc are serial ports, so they only transfer data one bit at a time. The USB iirc is a little better because of some of the existing interfaces, as well as USB8x/MSD8x :)

magicdanw(): o.o sound?? coolness!!!

imho, in game sound would be a really cool thing to do.

[magicdanw]

Well, I was going to keep you guessing, but I guess sound is the only other thing the link port is likely to be used for. Yup, it's a game that, if finished, will rely heavily on sound, so hopefully I'll be able to pump up the quality!

[TheStorm]

imo the original mario86 had sound but they scraped it in place of gray scale coolness.

[brandonw]

[Liazon]

I'm just pointing out it's not an ethernet cable.

[benryves]

The calculator's link port is ideal for I²C, which has enough address space for 112 devices (and is a multi-master capable bus).

[magicdanw]

So, would that protocol allow several calculators to be connected, using radio shack adapters to plug two standard cables into one calculator? That sounds like it could be pretty useful for games, since I think the stigma against multi-player games is that they might need link cables to be soldered together, which many people can't do (for instance, me! )