Coinop

Fourteen arcade games that run inside a Resolume composition, in Arena and Avenue. It comes as two plugins rather than one, because FFGL only resolves one entry point per binary: Coinop is a source that draws a playfield over its own background, and Coinop Over is an effect that draws one over the clip it's sitting on. The game itself is a dropdown rather than a separate plugin. Fourteen games don't need twenty-eight entries in the effect list, and a fifteenth won't need two more.

Snake grows, turns and eventually traps itself. Bricks is a ball, a paddle and a field to knock holes in. Marchers is a formation that steps down the screen and shoots back, speeding up as it thins out, as it should: that speed-up was the best accident in the original. Rally is two paddles and one ball. Drift is a ship with momentum and rocks that split. Stacker drops polyominoes and clears any contiguous run rather than a full row. Chase carves a fresh maze every level and sets four pursuers on it, each with its own idea of where you're going. Girders is a climb up floors that hazards come tumbling back down. Swarm is a formation that attackers peel out of, dive from and rejoin. Trails is riders who never stop, leaving walls behind them. Reflex is a prompt, a closing window, and the right button or nothing. Rafters is hitting the floor from underneath to flip whatever's standing on it. Duel is two fighters with wind-up, active and recovery frames, best of three. Flapper is one button against gravity, through the gaps in a wall that scrolls past, and it's the one game here that had to be given a difficulty ramp rather than a difficulty setting, because a competent flier at a fixed difficulty never dies at all.

The mechanics are the public-domain part. The names aren't the famous ones, on purpose, and neither is the expression. The playfield is whatever the Grid parameter says rather than a copied layout, colour comes from the palette by role rather than a per-object scheme, and the specific features courts have held to be protected are left out. Stacker is the clearest case: ten mixed polyominoes instead of the seven everyone knows, a run-clear instead of a line-clear, no ghost piece and no next-piece preview.

FFGL has no keyboard and no gamepad. It has parameters, and Resolume will MIDI- or OSC-map any of them. So every control is a parameter: a fader drives the paddle, four pads steer, one pad fires. Rally takes the fader for one paddle and two pads for the other, so two-player works from a single plugin instance. Presses are latched on the edge the moment the host delivers them rather than polled at render time, because a press that starts and ends between two frames is invisible to a poll, and at 50fps that's a 20ms window a drummer hits all the time.

Autoplay is the default and the mode that matters, because nobody's going to hand-play Snake for the length of a show. So the autopilot has to lose, and that's a feature rather than a quality bar: a perfect Snake AI never dies, never resets, and leaves the layer showing the same slowly lengthening snake all night. Skill sets how incompetent it is (tracking error, reaction lag, and a flat chance of ignoring its own survivability analysis), so the games end, restart, and keep the picture changing.

Its second job is pixel mapping. Point Resolume's pixel mapper at a composition running Coinop and the playfield becomes the lights. That's why everything is drawn as cells rather than geometry, why the grid size is a parameter, and why even Drift (the vector game, all continuous rotation and sub-cell drift) is rasterised into the same grid. A one-pixel antialiased vector line sampled onto a 30mm pitch wall lands between the fixtures and vanishes; a chunky rasterised outline survives the trip.