In the GBA days I saw a schematic to link the GB classic to a parallel port[0] and asked my older brother (I was still a child) to build it because I dreamed of trading my Pokémon online, just tunneling the data over the internet.
Unfortunately the GB link was engineered to work under low latencies only and my dream was crushed. I'm not sure if it was the games lacking support for lagged packets or if it was the hardware, but it just didn't work. It worked for local communication with an emulator, though!
Maybe now, with low-latency fiber all around, my dream is feasible? Contemporary Pokémon games are internet-ready so I guess it's not worth the effort, but it might be fun to live that dream again :)
You've hit the nail :) Indeed, modern emulators seem to lower the emulation speed: the game varies its speed and stutters (I guess depending on each packet's actual latency) when using the link over Bluetooth in an Android emulator.
IIRC, the connection was lost when the GB couldn't synchronize with its peer. I wanted it to work with the real GB, hit that wall and unfortunately lost interest.
Definitely. You can fill the data structures to make any Pokémon imaginable (Missingno was just particularly odd data), store it in the Arduino ROM (instead of grabbing the traded Pokémon) and let the magic happen.
This made me think of real-life Pokémon vending machines :) Or even recreating a physical Bill's PC!
In the GBA days I saw a schematic to link the GB classic to a parallel port[0] and asked my older brother (I was still a child) to build it because I dreamed of trading my Pokémon online, just tunneling the data over the internet.
Unfortunately the GB link was engineered to work under low latencies only and my dream was crushed. I'm not sure if it was the games lacking support for lagged packets or if it was the hardware, but it just didn't work. It worked for local communication with an emulator, though!
Maybe now, with low-latency fiber all around, my dream is feasible? Contemporary Pokémon games are internet-ready so I guess it's not worth the effort, but it might be fun to live that dream again :)
[0] http://www.devrs.com/gb/files/gb2pp7.gif