Building a multiplayer network game with multiple Raspberry Pis can be very difficult. Doing it in assembly is outright insane! This is exactly what a group of first year students at Imperial College London did; they created a network based multiplayer Tetris game for the Raspberry Pi.
[Han], [Piotr], [Michal], and [Utsav] have created this entire game from bare metal assembly, and it only consists of 4000 lines of code! The code is well documented, so be sure to look through their Github repository. This project is a great reference for those looking to learn bare metal assembly and networking. They even chose to use the old NES controllers, a very nice touch. While we have featured what seems like a million different Tetris games in the past, this is the first multiplayer version. See Tetris Duel in action in the video after the break!
This is a shout-out to all of you students out there. Take the time to create quality documentation for your class project, and upload it to the internet. Not only is it a great resume boost, but it could very well end up on Hackaday!
Thanks for that post! It was a lot of hard work, but it was definitely worth it.
Nice project. I always love a good tetris game, and it is always more fun to play head-to-head and test yourself against others…. unfortunately it is not the first mutliplayer version of tetris.
Tetris Splash XBOX360 Oct 2007 2-4 local multiplayer and 2-6 xbox live multiplayer
Tetris Evolution XBOX360 – Mar 2007 live capable for multiplayer
Tetris Worlds PC, GBA (2001), PS2, NGC, XBOX 2002 1-4 players
New Tetris Nintendo 64 – July 1999 1-4 players
Tetris 64 Nintendo 64 – Nov 1998 1-4 players
Tetris NES 1989 – 1-2 players
TETRIS (Atari/tengen version) – 1998 was the first version to use 2 player side-by-side
I believe the article meant this was the first multiplayer Tetris game to be featured on Hack A Day.
@johnbot – yes i realized that the article might have meant that, but i thought it was ambiguous enough that it needed clarifying…
Don’t forget Xtris on X-windows. Around 2001 iirc. Many ‘wasted’ office hours on that…
Heh for me it was netris, curses based multiplayer console tetris game, was popular for a while on irc in the mid/late 90’s
Tetrinet and tetrinet2 on windows where fun for a bit too
Tetris plus for the PSX had multi also.
Last semester for a second year university assignment we had to make a bare-metal assembly game for the Pi, though unfortunately weren’t given really any freedom in what the game was. Just had to make a simple key and door maze game (the previous semester, the very first semester for the course, got to make breakout games >_> ), though I did go beyond what we were required to and used tile graphics. https://github.com/ChartreuseK/Salamander-Maze
No where near as awesome as this tetris game, but maybe people can learn some more from, a fairly well documented, simpler game about some bare-metal programming on the Pi. It should be quite easy to compile and understand as this one was compiled with the GNU toolkit and spread over multiple files (some of which are from the previous assignment and not used in the game).