Run Multiple Instances of VBA for Link Play?

[murve33]

I'll use Puyo Pop as my rom example for simplicity's sake.

So I have an emulator setup for GBA games using the Visual Boy Advance Emulator, and it works fine.

Now I'd like to make another emulator setup for 2-Player Game Boy Advance Games. To make this easier I'd like GameEx to open two instances of VBA and have each load the rom necessary. Is this possible?

All I've been able to do is open VBA running Puyo Pop and another instance of VBA w/o loading Puyo Pop (Advanced Emulator Setup > Also Launch "VBA.exe").

Bonus Insane Question: Is it possible to also have the first instance start a LAN server and the second instance connect to said server? For example.

1. VisualBoyAdvance.exe "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" [startServer LocalHost]

2. VisualBoyAdvance.exe "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" [Connect LocalHost]

[nullPointer]

How comfortable are you with the command line interface and/or batch (.bat) scripting? I'm not familiar with the intimate details of how VBA handles this, but I think it would be achievable via a fairly simple wrapper (assuming it can all be launched from the command line at any rate - your bonus question seems to indicate that it's possible). Mainly I think you'd just need to pass your "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" into the a batch script as a parameter, and have the script handle running any subsequent commands.

I don't think it could be accomplished through GameEx without the help of a wrapper though.

Edit:

This post describes how you can pass a file path as a parameter into a batch file. If you can figure out the commands to run and the order in which to run them, I could probably put it all together into a wrapper script (assuming that passing parameters into the script was proving to be difficult)

[murve33]

Thank you very much for the info. VBA is very new to me, but I think I'd be capable of at least making a batch file. I'll give it a try soon.