An Approach to Sharing Legacy TV/Arcade Games for Real-Time Collaboration

Interactive TV/arcade games have been entertaining people for over 50 years. Nowadays a large number of legacy TV/arcade games have been ported to new platforms such as PCs by emulation. However, they generally require that the players be co-located to interact with one computer that emulates the game. This paper proposes a novel approach to turning those single-computer games into multi-computer games such that multiple players can play their favorite legacy games in real time over a computer network. The main challenge in this work is how to synchronize multiple replicas of a game without semantic knowledge about or modifications to the game. We have developed a novel synchronization algorithm and a working system to validate the ideas. In this paper we present the approach, especially the synchronization algorithm, and evaluate its effectiveness under a variety of network conditions. In future research we will extend this work on mobile devices.