Using 4.0-5825-dirty (pr-2139) I started up a game of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles with the LLE recompiler option enabled, using a dump from my Wii. Once I was able to successfully connect 2 VBA-M instances to the emulator, I made savestates with the intention of saving time. Since then, I've discovered that:
1. With the version of VBA-M built with skidau's patch, manually enabling the joybus link is not necessary each time the emulator is opened. I am able to just load the BIOS and load a savestate, which will immediately link the emulators.
2. I am able to launch the game with HLE audio and link the VBA-M instances using the savestates, with no problem.
3. By running the game in HLE and ensuring that the two copies of VBA-M have the radars hidden, there is minimal stutter/lag during gameplay. My boyfriend & I cleared year 1 in about an hour, and are halfway through year 2. While some areas (e.g. the Miasma Streams) cause lag where they do not on single player, it is much better than it was with LLE audio enabled.
4. Upon entering new areas, sometimes the GBA screen will continually flicker 'waiting for connection' and it will never be established. This can be halfway fixed by loading a savestate; the player will regain control of the character, but will be unable to switch to GBA mode, and the GameCube screen will display the 'waiting for connection' icon over their character icon until the problem can be resolved by changing areas again.
It appears, from our experiences, that the people who are saying that having the radars up causes the stutter/lag are correct. Spell casting & movement are much more responsive when both players have their radars hidden. Since all GBA connections share bandwidth, and are therefore slower the more you add I would suggest, when the feature itself is more stable, that an option be added to the emulator to toggle between accurate GBA-link emulation (i.e. the emulators are given the same amount of bandwidth for their connection as the real hardware) and enhanced GBA-link emulation, where the speed of the link is allowed to be higher than on hardware.
However, I'm not familiar with exactly how the hardware accomplishes this or if it would be problematic to include an option like that. If it can be done, I think it would be a valuable/popular enhancement, though.
All in all, this branch & VBA-M patch work much better than the vanilla versions of either, and I'm very impressed. Thanks for your hard work!
EDIT: I only just realised that the download link for Dolphin is linked to the buildbot command from the pull request, and I've been using an older build. I am now updated to 5843-dirty, and will edit this post again if I find that any of what I posted here has changed.
1. With the version of VBA-M built with skidau's patch, manually enabling the joybus link is not necessary each time the emulator is opened. I am able to just load the BIOS and load a savestate, which will immediately link the emulators.
2. I am able to launch the game with HLE audio and link the VBA-M instances using the savestates, with no problem.
3. By running the game in HLE and ensuring that the two copies of VBA-M have the radars hidden, there is minimal stutter/lag during gameplay. My boyfriend & I cleared year 1 in about an hour, and are halfway through year 2. While some areas (e.g. the Miasma Streams) cause lag where they do not on single player, it is much better than it was with LLE audio enabled.
4. Upon entering new areas, sometimes the GBA screen will continually flicker 'waiting for connection' and it will never be established. This can be halfway fixed by loading a savestate; the player will regain control of the character, but will be unable to switch to GBA mode, and the GameCube screen will display the 'waiting for connection' icon over their character icon until the problem can be resolved by changing areas again.
It appears, from our experiences, that the people who are saying that having the radars up causes the stutter/lag are correct. Spell casting & movement are much more responsive when both players have their radars hidden. Since all GBA connections share bandwidth, and are therefore slower the more you add I would suggest, when the feature itself is more stable, that an option be added to the emulator to toggle between accurate GBA-link emulation (i.e. the emulators are given the same amount of bandwidth for their connection as the real hardware) and enhanced GBA-link emulation, where the speed of the link is allowed to be higher than on hardware.
However, I'm not familiar with exactly how the hardware accomplishes this or if it would be problematic to include an option like that. If it can be done, I think it would be a valuable/popular enhancement, though.
All in all, this branch & VBA-M patch work much better than the vanilla versions of either, and I'm very impressed. Thanks for your hard work!
EDIT: I only just realised that the download link for Dolphin is linked to the buildbot command from the pull request, and I've been using an older build. I am now updated to 5843-dirty, and will edit this post again if I find that any of what I posted here has changed.