When you fire up Fightcade on a dusty ThinkPad or link up a pair of original Xbox consoles in your basement, you are asking copper and silicon to cheat time. Back in the heyday of the Sega Saturn and the arcades, multiplayer meant sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with someone, breathing stale air and tasting lukewarm quarters. Today, preservationists and retro collectors are dragging these offline artifacts kicking and screaming into the modern broadband era. But making a game built for local, single-frame cathode-ray tubes feel smooth across a transatlantic internet connection requires serious algorithmic wizardry.