Original PlayStation Games Could Play Online With Rollback Thanks To Fighting Game Fan

thegamer.com:

There's always been a problem with online play, and that's latency. It's especially problematic for fighting games where the difference between victory and defeat could be as little as a few frames. Thankfully, more recent fighting games feature the new standard in netcode that gets as close to an in-person feel as online play can get, and pretty soon it could be coming to classic fighters from the OG PlayStation.

It's called "rollback netcode," and it works by essentially guessing what the players will do next whenever there are spikes in latency. In older fighting games, a lag spike would cause either one of both players to hang, interrupting the action. With rollback netcode, minor connection drops or lag spikes don't appear unless the netcode guesses wrong, then it will "rollback" to where the lag started. Ultimately, this results in less noticeable lag for the players and much smoother gameplay overall.

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Rollback netcode is the standard for games like Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, and Mortal Kombat 11, but older games are still dealing with simple netcode from the dawn of the internet--if they even still have servers to connect to, that is. But one student from the Netherlands is working to provide classic fighters with updated netcode that will bring them into the 21st century.

Heat on Twitter has been working on rollback netcode for original PlayStation games like Tekken, Bloody Roar, and Rival Schools. They're making this netcode publicly available on GitHub, meaning emulator programs could incorporate this code to enable modern multiplayer in classic fighting games.

In addition, Heat is also working on adding PlayStation emulation