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The BBA is a very sticky situation.
In AFO's case the game is over two years old. At that time BBA drivers didn't
even exist, and the Arcade game ran on 56K technology. When porting it to
Dreamcast, if they wanted to add BBA support, they'd basically have to gut out
and re-write all the netcode. (which they should've done anyway, the game was
shown at E3 two years ago... what the heck were they doing for two years?)
The Sega of America dev. kit supports all forms of Broadband. PPPoE, static, and
DHCP. WSB2K2 was written on a totally new engine, so it should support BBA. The
dev. kit they made the game with natively supports it. So why is it missing? Who
knows.
Here's a Usenet theory:
"After having followed this BBA saga for awhile, I'm skeptical that
laziness was a factor.
A voice-modem & peer-to-peer networking were both designed for the Atari
Jaguar. The voice-modem was never released, and reportedly works
perfectly for local calls, and not at all for long-distance calling.
The networking was included in only 3 games - Doom, Aircars, and
Battlesphere. Of the 3, only Doom was released while Atari was still
around and selling the Jaguar (I know that technically they're still
around, but you know what I mean).
According to posts I've read from Jaguar programmers, there were
undocumented hardware bugs in the Jag's communications firmware, that
caused tremendous difficulty to developers trying to implement
functional networking in their code. Consequently, networked Doom
doesn't work properly, and the Battlesphere developers supposedly had to
work long and hard to workaround the problem. I assume there are
problems as well with Aircars networking, but I can't say for certain.
Back to my point, I suspect there is something we don't know about
causing the lack of Broadband support in most Dreamcast games. It seems
to me it should be a simple matter to program a game to use the internet
connectivity, regardless of where the connectivity comes from. I'd
expect the game to just use TCP/IP, and the developer simply needs a
driver for either the modem or the BBA, whichever happens to be in use.
Of course, I'm speculating here, as I don't really know what I'm talking
about.
I think there is a reason we're not aware of causing the BBA to go
unused. It might be hardware-related, it might be industry-politics, it
might be pay-offs, it might be some loony decision from Marketing. I
don't really know. BUT, I don't think it's a case of developers being
lazy. I believe there's more to it."
The Japanese dev. kit supports the BBA and there are a lot more BBA compatible
games there. However the Japanese dev. kit doesn't support PPPoE. (since it
isn't used there)
So in PSO's case, SOA couldn't claim the game was Broadband compatible without
PPPoE support, so they just removed the setup configurations. (which they're now
re-adding for PSO v2, and have already did with Outtrigger. Their configuration
screens are just modified Broadband Passport's)
The reason why we have no BBA compatible US browser is because of PlanetWeb.
PlanetWeb ... sucks, and Sega couldn't release the Japanese BBA browser because
of their contract with PlanetWeb.
The whole BBA issue is just a mess. From laziness, to poor management and
communication between SOA and SOJ.
Here's more info:
"Probably a lot harder than you think - the network code in the Japanese
market BB supporting games is produced by Access Co. - it's supplied as
a binary file, and has no source available. It doesn't support PPPoE,
since nobody in Japan is sufficiently brain damaged as to use it.
The final devkit released by SOA DTS included BB adapter support (with
PPPoE), but did so using a different TCP stack (NexGen), and was
incompatible with the code used in Japan in a number of ways. If you
want to use this code, you also have to use the version of the libs it's
supplied with, introducing more chances of breaking things.
Effectively, supporting PPPoE means that you have to rewrite parts of
your network code, and stand the risk of lots of other things breaking
from the library version change. Most sane developers don't want to do
this, especially as the people who this effects are a part (PPPoE) of a
small part (have broadband) of an already small userbase (DC owners).
Quite why SOA handled it this way, I don't know - it would seem to me to
make a lot more sense to get Access Co. to write a PPPoE driver to work
with the existing stack, which would have had a much better chance of
just dropping into existing code."
... and yet I only have two nominations ... maybe if I got a big cow icon people
would remember me more. Oh well.
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"Sean Connery, rec.games.video.sega:
On the PC, the network stack/NIC drivers are integrated into the OS, the
game just needs to know TCP/IP, and can then either use TCP/IP bound to a
NIC and broadband, or to a dialup modem, etc.
On the DC, there is no onboard central OS/net stack/drivers. It DOES
store some settings for the modem/BBA, but that is it. That is why the
games/apps must ship with all the needed software, and all variations of
POTS/BBA/PPPOE/DHCP code to get things working.
Having a more "central" approach would have been far better. As well as
the BBA having a POTS chipset onboard as well so I didn't have to swap
modems all the time for code that only supported POTS... But alas..."
--------
Basically what it means is that with a computer, the operating system, whether
it be Windows, Linux, Mac, BeOS, whatever, handles ALL the networking by itself.
All a game has to do is have TCP/IP support, and the OS handles the rest. (the
OS binds your Ethernet card to TCP/IP) That's why a game written before
Broadband can still be played on Broadband. All the game does is try to connect
via TCP/IP, and the OS does the rest.
On the Dreamcast, BBA games require their own code and drivers to initalize the
BBA, and handle the TCP/IP code for the BBA. Sega >>>SHOULDN'T<<< have done it
like this, but they did, and this is why adding BBA support isn't easy like
adding BBA support on a PC. On a PC, all a game needs is to be able to connect
via TCP/IP, and it can connect with anything. Modems, Broadband, ISDN, etc,
because the OS handles everything itself.
I'm not sure how Sega could've done this though without having an actual OS in
the background. |
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