Delightfully Horrible Idea: Twitch Installs Linux

October 30, 2015 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

Linux is a delightful OS. There are an amazing range of built-in tools, and innumerable others that can be installed from publicly available repositories using just a single line of commands. You can also hose your entire system with just a handful of characters; something that was en vogue as a method of trolling many years ago. Who knows if either of those will get used when Twitch Installs Arch Linux.

Beginning on Saturday morning, a single keyboard will be controlled by thousands of people whose collective goal is to install a Linux distro in a virtual box. There will undoubtedly be thousands of others trying to thwart the process. We were enthralled with Twitch Plays Pokemon last year. Live viewers’ keystrokes were translated to the Game Boy controls and the majority consensus decided the next move. This was insane with just a few controls, but now we’re talking about an entire keyboard.

Every 10 seconds, the most popular keystroke will be chosen. To put this in perspective, the previous sentence would have taken exactly 10 minutes to type, and only if the majority constantly agreed on what the next letter should be. We can’t tell if it’s going to be interesting or boring to participate. But either way, we can’t wait to see what unforeseen happenings shake out of the process.

Pokáde: Twitch Plays Pokemon, Reborn On Vintage Hardware

August 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

poke 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.

Twitch Plays Pokémon: Better Than Prime Time TV

February 26, 2014 by Adam Fabio 27 Comments

What do you get when you put together a classic Game Boy game, some glue code, a streaming video website and 1 internet? Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP), a social experiment where thousands of people “cooperatively” play a game of Pokémon Red/Blue. TPP was created by an anonymous Australian programmer who enjoyed the SaltyBet interactive channel on twitch.tv. Rather than use SaltyBet’s method of having users interact via an external website, [TPP’s creator] decided to use twitch’s own IRC based chat servers. Starting with VisualBoyAdvance, a popular C/C++ based Game Boy emulator, [TPP’s creator] began building the system. [TPP’s creator] went with python to create the web-to-emulator interface. A JavaScript app displays the live moves on the right side of the screen.

Gameplay is simple – users type their command (Up, Down, A, B) into their IRC or web client. In the original configuration, commands were processed in the order they arrived at the game. The system worked until the whole thing went viral. With thousands of people entering commands at any given time, poor “RED” would often be found spinning in place, or doing other odd things. The effect is so compelling that even [Randal Munroe] has written an XKCD entry about it. To help the players get through some of the tricky parts of the game, [TPP’s creator] added a game mode selection. Users can play in “Democracy” where the system takes votes for several seconds, then issues the highest voted command. The original anything goes game mode was renamed “Anarchy”. Switching from one mode to the other is determined by the users themselves in real-time.

[Devon], one of our readers, has been busy as well. He’s written up a tutorial on turning a Raspberry Pi into a dedicated TPP viewer. We’d love to see a TPP battlestation – a Game Boy modified to display TPP, as well as send commands to the IRC servers when buttons are pressed. Who will be the first reader to knock that hack out?