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If I had an open source emulator for C64, Mame, Spectrum and the like, would it be possible to hack away at the code and merge it with some kind of Game Center functionality, achieving online multiplayer in the emulator?

I'm not asking for the code or anything, I just had an image of booting up an emulator, a Game Center window saying it's looking for players, then starting a 2-player game. Is that feasible, or is just not possible to integrate an emulator with GC like that?

SM2011
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You could make one computer host the game by running the emulator. It would stream the video+audio to the remote computer, and receive keyboard+joystick events from it. Hacking this up would be far from a trivial task, but not colossal either. I don't think there's any useful "Game Center" software that would do this for you - you'd have to code it up yourself.

If the video streaming is a bottleneck, you could perhaps stream the emulated machine's state changes instead. This is much more ambitious in terms of the amount of coding needed, but it would probably solve any throughput problems.

Practical playability would suffer from network lag. Over the internet, you would probably be limited to turn-based games. In a local network, it might work well for action games too - it's all too hypothetical to really tell.

hemflit
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    The latency here would be really bad, making anything but turn-based stuff unplayable. Mobile data connections are designed for data burst speed, not for the low latency needed for gaming. – Almo Sep 21 '15 at 12:54
  • Over mobile internet, yeah. But to be fair iPhones (&c.) can use WiFi as well. Also, with the mention of a "Game Center _window_" I'd imagine the OP's primary idea was to do this on a Mac. – hemflit Sep 21 '15 at 14:29
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Apple won't allow you to publish an emulator on iOS. It requires downloading and executing code to run a particular game, which is forbidden.

Almo
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