I have a Gauntlet Legends cabinet in our house, which I've turned into a co-op MAME cabinet featuring a handful of classic games (Gauntlet II, Rampage, TMNT, Golden Axe, etc.). The idea is to encourage my boys to have friends over, and jump into some retro gaming where everyone works together.
To that end, I banged out a 4-player co-op version of Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, which I call Pac-Fam.
The color and starting order of each Pac-person matches the color of the controls on the cabinet. People pick it up immediately, and it's pretty fun, though it would need some more polish (score, etc.) to make it complete.
Anyway, today I found myself thinking two things:
1. What other arcade greats could be adapted to multiplayer co-op? Like maybe Dig-Dug, for example?
2. Would any other home arcade folks be interested in such games?
If the answer to 2 is "yes," then maybe I could clean up my code and make it more portable, and host it on GitHub. That would also allow others to contribute too. You would need a launcher that can launch an arbitrary app instead of only MAME etc. games, but I assume that's not too hard to find (I wrote my own launcher too, because that's just what I do). Though of course there are copyright issues to worry about.
Opinions on either question, or anything related, is more than welcome...
To that end, I banged out a 4-player co-op version of Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, which I call Pac-Fam.
The color and starting order of each Pac-person matches the color of the controls on the cabinet. People pick it up immediately, and it's pretty fun, though it would need some more polish (score, etc.) to make it complete.
Anyway, today I found myself thinking two things:
1. What other arcade greats could be adapted to multiplayer co-op? Like maybe Dig-Dug, for example?
2. Would any other home arcade folks be interested in such games?
If the answer to 2 is "yes," then maybe I could clean up my code and make it more portable, and host it on GitHub. That would also allow others to contribute too. You would need a launcher that can launch an arbitrary app instead of only MAME etc. games, but I assume that's not too hard to find (I wrote my own launcher too, because that's just what I do). Though of course there are copyright issues to worry about.
Opinions on either question, or anything related, is more than welcome...