ARCADE

a film by Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin
Photo by Michael Nagle (originally appeared in the August 4th, 2010 New York Times) Today we are interviewing Ivan, a devoted rhythm game player and a former regular at Chinatown Fair, where he maintained the In The Groove arcade machine, while hacking it to keep updating the song selection.  It amazes me how passionate the ITG community is.  The story of how the the game series, which is widely considered to be the best of all music dance games, was discontinued after a lawsuit against the game’s manufacturer and how the community took matters into their own hands to keep the game alive.  The Wikipedia entry on In The Groove is worth reading.   The “Machine Hacking” section is particularly interesting to me. “Technologically savvy players have found methods of hacking additional content onto an “In the Groove 2” machine. The most popular methods involve utilizing a live Linux distribution (most methods SLAX Frodo) to boot the machine to a rogue operating system that the user has control over. Additional songs are loaded onto a USB card (plugged into the Player 1 USB port), and a USB keyboard (plugged into the Player 2 USB port) is used to type commands at the Linux console. Most of these hacks utilize an option in one of StepMania’s configuration files, Static.ini, to load songs and content from additional locations other than the main song folder.” -Kurt

Photo by Michael Nagle (originally appeared in the August 4th, 2010 New York Times)

Today we are interviewing Ivan, a devoted rhythm game player and a former regular at Chinatown Fair, where he maintained the In The Groove arcade machine, while hacking it to keep updating the song selection.  It amazes me how passionate the ITG community is.  The story of how the the game series, which is widely considered to be the best of all music dance games, was discontinued after a lawsuit against the game’s manufacturer and how the community took matters into their own hands to keep the game alive.  The Wikipedia entry on In The Groove is worth reading.   The “Machine Hacking” section is particularly interesting to me.

“Technologically savvy players have found methods of hacking additional content onto an “In the Groove 2” machine. The most popular methods involve utilizing a live Linux distribution (most methods SLAX Frodo) to boot the machine to a rogue operating system that the user has control over. Additional songs are loaded onto a USB card (plugged into the Player 1 USB port), and a USB keyboard (plugged into the Player 2 USB port) is used to type commands at the Linux console. Most of these hacks utilize an option in one of StepMania’s configuration files, Static.ini, to load songs and content from additional locations other than the main song folder.”

-Kurt

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