LAN: finally merged!
As promised, LAN multiplayer is mostly finished, and a first version of it has been merged. This feature was already largely functional, so all that was needed was to backport it to the modern melonDS codebase and fix up the UI side of it. We can also thank Nadia who provided great help fixing up the ENet integration.

You may now grab it over at Github, in the Actions tab (you will need a Github account).

The way this works is the same, so I will simply copy-paste from that old post:


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. In my experience, wifi has too much latency.


This marks the end of season 3, and the beginning of season 4: netplay. Ironically, netplay was the original goal of season 2 -- LAN happened more or less as an experimental side project, and it happened to work out rather well, so it stuck around.

So, stay tuned for the netplay adventures!


Also, we are working out how to properly label melonDS builds from the CI, releases and nightlies alike. When we figure it out, I will probably add the download section for nightlies.
keisui says:
Aug 11th 2024
this is huge for ds emulation , amazing work
Maikol says:
Aug 11th 2024

I've gone to download the season 3 file, I'm trying to try it, but when my friend connects he keeps getting an error.
Arisotura says:
Aug 11th 2024
how much is the latency between your two computers? (try the ping command)
Maikol says:
Aug 11th 2024
It is 33 or 25 ms, when it joins my room, we use radmin as a local network, we start the new super mario rom, and we go into the minijuices section, and unfortunately every time it is going to join my room, it gets a message that says "communication error"
Maikol says:
Aug 11th 2024
Minigames sorry
Nerodess says:
Aug 11th 2024
On System > Multiplayer it just shows "Launch new instance". No "Host" or "Join"
Foxeh says:
Aug 11th 2024
tried to do LAN multiplayer via radmin with 2 others
our ping was around 60 - 180ms
while we saw the lobbies, we got communication error before we could join anything
Nerodess says:
Aug 11th 2024
How can I update to this version? I would like to play multiplayer with my friends, but I just get error messages with the latest release and the options mentioned here don't exist... Please help!
loes says:
Aug 12th 2024
where do i get the buid
zakilj3 says:
Aug 12th 2024
im afraid LAN will work only on actual lan(aka two pc on same wifi), I tried as well using radmin to no success.

im curious if this LAN could work well on the unofficial android port, tho that one would require the dev behind said port to implement it and i guess make an UI for it
BigFlashBangy says:
Aug 13th 2024
When is the 1.0 update gonna be posted?
Ping over 9000!!! says:
Aug 20th 2024
The post is called "LAN multiplayer" but I see alot of people here talk about using LAN over radmin (so thats LAN over WAN, so it will have much higher latency than you would normally have in LAN (unless you are using WiFi).

what is the maximum ping that most games tolerate before the connection fails?

Tip for those users: use wired ethernet!!, connecting your PC to the network over WiFi adds alot of latency, most packets might have low latency, but it will have high latency spikes semi frequently when the wifi network is congested which might disconnect the emulated connection.
Eddiegames9 says:
Aug 30th 2024
Congratulations!
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