Well, I gave IP65 a test over the weekend. Worked fine, but MV's code is very hard to follow, especially since I'm not used to ca65.

Everything worked as advertised. Sent and received UDP packets, could ping the 64, etc.

The 64 was able to blast out ~250 UDP packets per second - that's way more than you would need for a network game which is cool. Lots of potential there.

Very nice!
Keep us posted!

Have you tested how much power does it take to receive steady 50 packets per second and how big the latency is? (The latter would require two C64s with RR-Nets to tell the real performance so it might be harder for single person to test. Unless you own two RR-Nets, of course.)

Why 50 packets per second? Do you want the receiving to be sync'd to the raster scan rate? It would be interesting to do the send and receive as a raster interrupt, and see visually (with inc/dec $d020) how long they each take.

The effort and latency will depend mostly on the size of the packets, of course.

Instead of two C64s, I can quickly write a UDP reflector on my PC.

LAN gaming Packet size would be quite small, minimum one byte for joystick state. Some games would need to send more data about gameworld, but rarely more than 256 bytes.

You'll want to send more than just joystick state, because if things get out of sync you would have interesting problems.

It's not many more bytes to send a packet saying "my character is at this x,y(,z)" location. Unless you had a central server controlling everyone's position pased on joystick states.