Emulator

Game Name?

Not applicable

Game ID?

Not applicable

MD5 Hash?

Not applicable

What's the problem? Describe what went wrong.

After having been shown a video by a friend of mine where "I'm a Blisy" demonstrated Dolphin NetPlay and even provided a prepared bundle including Gecko/AR cheats to introduce certain features to Pokemon XD to facilitate NetPlay in a VGC-Style setup to enable people to play against each other in Generation 3 of Pokemon, I was effectively tasked with "vetting" the whole setup; figuring out the ins and outs, since I am the infra guy in our group - I have my own servers and deal with Kubernetes and stuff. So basically, I was told to make it work as best as I can...for a group of visually impaired people, for whom the many menus might be difficult to navigate. And so I did.

Starting out with the initial version as provided on their Github page, I encountered no issues. The NTkit/GCZ dump that I made off of my friend's XD and the GBA cartridge and save dump I did with my GBxCart worked just fine. What caused all the troubble though, was the NetPlay aspect itself. In my confusion after several hours of troubbleshooting, I wrote a Reddit thread about my situation. And, probably due to sleepyness, eventually overlooked the minute detail: My friend could host, and I could join - but vice versa did not work, because either my routers' UPnP failed or something else.

Those hours could've been made significantly easier and simpler if I have had more log output - I would have known what IP/Port the binding had succeeded on and perhaps the protocol (TCP or UDP) too. Further, I did in fact not get a Windows Defender popup about allowing network traffic - I just manually added the entry myself by directly going into the firewall settings (which, admittedly, are much more confusing than IPTables... xD Never thought I'd say that).

While not exactly a bug, I would consider it a flaw that there is basically no reporting about the tcp/udp binding process or anything that the emulator might be doing (be it issuing commands to WPF or alike). Further, the Traversal Server settings only allow resetting - but explicitly setting which one to use was also not an option - and, for whatever reason, my friend could not even utilize that server to host; only the Direct method worked. Knowing if it was perhaps a DNS lookup issue or something else would have helped debug that as well.

So, this is why I made a bug report. Apologies if this sounds more like a Feature Requrest at first glance - but better logging (or the absence of such) is kind of a grey area between a bug and a feature, don't you think? :)

What steps will reproduce the problem?

I followed the instructions as given in the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QewOrQx1o7s
After initially trying to connect my friend via the traversal server - and the failure of that - I switched to using the Direct Method. This is where my troubbleshooting began.

Is the issue present in the latest development version? For future reference, please also write down the version number of the latest development version.

The initial version of the "XDNetPlay" project was v2407 if I recall correctly. During the troubbleshooting, I updated to the most recent version on all affected hosts, which is 2409-318 (HEAD).
Auto updates are disabled to preserve state in the time of troubbleshooting - and, as this is supposed to be a single-use-case package, I will apply updates manually if required. Fow now though, they are "frozen" to make reproduction easier.

Is the issue present in the latest release? For future reference, please also write down the version number of the latest release.

Yes.

If the issue isn't present in the latest release, which is the first broken version?

Not applicable

If your issue is a graphical issue, please attach screenshots and record a three frame fifolog of the issue if possible. Screenshots showing what it is supposed to look like from either console or older builds of Dolphin will help too. For more information on how to use the fifoplayer, please check here: https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=FifoPlayer

Not applicable]

What are your PC specifications? (CPU, GPU, Operating System, more)

(CPU, GPU, RAM)
Mine: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, NVIDIA RTX 4090, 32GB
Friend: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, AMD Radeon 7800XT, 16GB

Is there anything else that can help developers narrow down the issue? (e.g. logs, screenshots,
configuration files, savefiles, savestates)

Nothing I could think of, I am afraid. I have attached all relevant links though, hope they can serve as a good reference.
What I would love seing is just to have more log output, really.

Thank you for your time and hard work!

Kind regards,
Ingwie