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:''Multi-tap also refers to a text-entry system for mobile phones.''

A 'multitap' is a video game console peripheral that expands the number of controller ports available to the player, thus allowing additional controllers to be used in play. A multitap often takes the form of a box with three or more controller ports which is then connected to a spare port on the console itself.
Mainly sports games supported multitaps due the multiplayer aspect of some sport games, though some RPGs and first person shooters have taken advantage of multitap support.

Contents

History

8-bit era

16-bit era

32-bit era and beyond

References

External Links

History

8-bit era

The first multitap device to be produced was by NEC-Hudson Soft for the PC-Engine / TurboGrafx-16. The PC-Engine is one of the few consoles to have been originally fitted with only one controller port. To make "multiplayer" gaming possible, one had to purchase the ''Turbo Tap'', expanding the PC-Engine to 5 players.
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) saw two official multitaps, the NES Four Score and the wireless NES Satellite.

16-bit era

Electronic Arts - Sega's most important 3rd party developer for the Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis - released the 4 Way Play to make four-player sports games possible. Shortly after that, Sega released its own four-player adapter which was incompatible with EA's adapter. The way out of that difficult situation was a slightly redesigned adapter by Sega, which supported both the Sega and the EA formats.

Codemasters developed a quasi-multitap for the Mega Drive called the J-Cart, first released in 1994.^[1] The game would have two extra joypad ports built into the cartridge itself, thus negating the need to buy extra hardware (beyond two more joypads) to play four-player games.
Nintendo, in conjunction with Hudson Soft, released in 1993, the ''Super Multitap'' for the Super Nintendo, it could be purchased bundled with the well regarded game ''Super Bomberman'' which helped establish the popularity of the peripheral. Several other compatible SNES Multitaps followed. With the success of the Nintendo device, the term "multitap" became synonymous with similar devices.
A few games released for the Amiga home computer system after 1995 included support for custom-built multitaps. Instructions for how to build a multitap were included in the manual to classic Amiga racing sequel ''Super Skidmarks''. The Amiga multitap would plug into the computer's serial port and provide two additional ports for use. Earlier, the Amiga version of Bomberman, Dynablaster had already included support for a similar device.

32-bit era and beyond

Multitaps were released by Atari for the Jaguar, Sega for the Saturn and Sony for its PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles.
The PlayStation multitaps also allow the same number of memory cards as controllers. In games such as , this allows all players to insert memory cards and track their personal statistics.
In recent years the multitap has become an increasingly redundant peripheral, with most console designers preferring to simply expand the number of controller ports on the console itself. While the first console to actually feature 4 built-in controller ports was the Bally Astrocade, that feature would not be widely used again for well over a decade until the arrival of the Nintendo 64. Subsequent consoles, with the exception of Sony's PlayStation 2, all included four ports as standard. With the advent of standard wireless controllers in the next generation of consoles, the days of the traditional multitap seems to come to an end.

References

1. Quadro-Power

External Links