Thanks to the efforts of the melee community and the devs at slippi.gg, Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube can now be played with less lag ONLINE than Smash Ultimate OFFLINE. There are a ton of resources explaining how rollback netcode works, but in short it opens up all of NA to play with each other with very little if any lag. It genuinely feels like offline playing people across the country, I've even played against someone in SA without experiencing noticable input lag.
It is miles ahead of the previous iterations of netplay and a very exciting time to get involved in the melee scene.
The new FasterMelee launcher, a custom build of dolphin emulator for GameCube and Wii games has released with built in matchmaking, so no need to deal with connect codes! It is quite literally plug and play.
If anyone needs any help setting it up, there are tons of guides on old.reddit.com/r/ssbm on the front page, and you can contact me as well.
I would highly recommend you support the amazing development team by donating when downloading the emulator, but you can always just get it for free too.
Get it at slippi.gg
Exciting times :)
edit: great video by TSM Leffen going through rollback and what this means for the melee scene
https://youtu.be/erbZV8u6-hA