< LAN multiplayer: in the worksRTC and ambitious plans >
LAN multiplayer: getting there!
Oct 7th 2023, by Arisotura
As of today:



LAN gameplay between the two computers I have at hand over here.

LAN is actually fairly close to a finished product, now. It's obviously still a bit rough around the edges, may be a tad unstable, but from my testing it has shown to be pretty smooth.

From this point, I encourage anybody who is interested to grab the experimental builds from our Github CI. It's the runs labelled 'season2 test PR'; note that you will need a Github account to download them.

But if you're motivated, please give them some deep testing, abuse them in whatever ways you can think of, and report anything that seems odd to you, in our IRC or Discord or in this thread. We'd like these features to be rock-solid for the 1.0 release.

How to get a LAN game going:

1. On the host machine: open melonDS, then System -> Multiplayer -> Host LAN game. You enter a player name and you're good to go.

2. On client machines: open melonDS, then System -> Multiplayer -> Join LAN game. Enter your player name there, then it should list any existing LAN games. If not, you can always try using the direct connect button.

3. Once all sides are connected to the LAN game, you can open a ROM on each machine and try getting a game going. Do note that you will need a good local network for this to work. Ethernet should work, but anything else may fail if the latency can get too high.

That should be about it. There are also options pertaining to netplay, but for now, it doesn't work. I had managed to get it working as a very crude proof of concept, but due to changes in the melonDS codebase since then, it's broken. I will let you know when I can get it working again.

Have fun!


EDIT- clarification on the terminology:

LAN is for playing local multiplayer games over a local network (ie. multiple computers in the same house for example).

Netplay is for playing local multiplayer games over the internet.

Neither of these apply to online multiplayer (aka WFC).
62 comments have been posted.
< LAN multiplayer: in the worksRTC and ambitious plans >
hybrid says:
Oct 10th 2023
I am so ready for the next update : )
Lemon says:
Oct 13th 2023
yooo... another steps forward for humanity XD
student says:
Oct 14th 2023
I am foreign elementary school student.
My English is not so fluent.
system→ multiplayer→only launch new instance... Where is Host LAN game? Please tell me in more detail how to play LAN games.
Lazed Donut says:
Oct 14th 2023
Will you get mad at us for sharing issues we find when testing it out with LogMeIn Hamachi, or would that be suitable enough for testing?
JIIN says:
Oct 14th 2023
I sincerely hope that the netplay function is implemented.
Arisotura says:
Oct 14th 2023
I just highly doubt you'll be able to connect any game over Hamachi tbh
PeeJay Bonobo says:
Oct 15th 2023
I apologize for being late to the party, but I guess I'll be the person to test VPN stuff, but I do wish native NetPlay over the Internet (I don't mean Nintendo WFC) would be functional, though. Regardless, this is a massive step forward for melonDS.
AsPika says:
Oct 16th 2023
Oh yeah! NETWORKING!!! PC into PC into PC into PC etc..... Is time for MULTIPLAYER mode! 🤩
Fahyda says:
Oct 16th 2023
This is very cool, tho I think it may be a good idea not to show ip adresses when the stable build for lan play comes out, specially when using netplay instead once thats ready.
Martyste says:
Oct 18th 2023
I may not have 2 computers available at the same time right now to test LAN on separated hardware, but I took this opportunity to test same hardware LAN and got quite the shock! 8 instances of Mario Kart DS, with players spread accross the entire track, and no issues at all in over 20 minutes of runtime. Better yet, while all instances are on Software mode ( waiting for AMD to do something about their broken drivers or that new renderer to come out ), they can all run at 150% still and stay on sync. Can't wait to repair my old laptop and get a real LAN experience going! My kudos to you once again Arisotura for this amazing work.
Lucas5423 says:
Oct 18th 2023
You mention in the post you have to open the same game, but I want to play Mario party ds which only supports one cartridge play, would this still work for that, if I boot into download play on one ds and put mpds on the other?
Fluffbutt Squirrel03 says:
Oct 18th 2023
Congratulations!! Wow, this is going to be awesome to play with friends. Perhaps we may even see the use of reinforcement learning videos, like humans versus Ai, like AiTango did with MariokartWii on Dolphin. I so hope to see more ideas, this is brilliant work!

Y'all making dreams come true, gg!
Dii says:
Oct 22nd 2023
Will it be possible to use two android phones with their wifi? Either wifi direct, hotspot, or separate AP.
Dii says:
Oct 22nd 2023
💀💀 Still using windows 7..
somelinuxer says:
Oct 24th 2023
Just a question, is there any way to do "fake interpolation" for this? Like have each machine run their own emulator instance and send/receive dummy (almost unchanged) packets when there's congestion or the connection is slow?
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