Early this year, Twitch Plays Pokemon, a webstream of tens of thousands of people playing the same game of Pokemon via web chat. It was certainly an interesting sociological phenomenon, but as in any system where thousands of people try to do a single thing, progress was exceedingly slow at points. This was compounded by the fact the Twitch stream delayed the chat by about 30 seconds.
At the time, there was some talk about setting up an alternative to the emulator-based Twitch stream. Ideas were floated, but until now, no one has yet come up with a workable solution. Now we have Pokáde: real Pokemon games (Red and Blue) running on real hardware (two Super Game Boys, two super Nintendos, and two Game Genies), streamed live to the Internet with an IRC-like chat function.
Simply for the ease of capturing the video of the stream, [Johannes], the guy behind all of this, is using a pair of Super Nintendos and Super Game Boys connected to USB video capture dongles. The Super Game Boys are modded to enable trading between the Red and Blue versions of the game, and controls are handled with a USB connection to the PC running the server.
Anyone can play the game, simply by going to the Pokáde Chat, entering the chat, and clicking on random buttons on the brick Game Boy GUI. The game ROMs have been slightly modified to disable the option of starting a new game, but this is still the classic Twitch Plays Pokemon experience: people all around the globe mashing buttons and creating a religion around a fossil pokemon.
Just a quick note unlike ‘Twitch plays Pokémon’ users must apply to play using the commands ‘Apply Red’ or ‘Apply Blue’ then once chosen you may control the game via the web interface
Also, do note that blue is currently buggy and controls may fail or die out completely sometimes. BE PATIENT WHILE IT IS FIXED! thankyou :3
blue is fixed!
It’s not that the chat was delayed by 30 seconds but the video was delayed by 30 seconds (I know minor point but figured i’d mention it)
It was both, wasn’t it? I was there for gen I (I was there when we caught Zapdos!) and the chat did seem laggy.
Twitch chat (based on IRC) is (most of the time) lag free. The lag you see is encoding and video distribution (IIRC Twitch adds about 30s of lag due to HLS)
I wanna see more of this hack!
Pretty cool, but I was heartbroken that someone released Bulbasaur. Hurts too much to play.