I must first apologize for my ignorance, as this whole idea may be ridiciulous. But maybe not. We shall see. I have never done it before, but I SEEM to recall that several NES and SNES emulators have some sort of 2-player networking options?? Or am I completely off-base, totally mistaken? If not, would there be any interest in some 2 player vs. battles via computer, internet, and emulators? I have never had anyone actually interested in this sort of thing, but if it is possible, I would be totally willing to battle it out with my fellow SNES Tetris powerhouses! And if it is possible, I wouldn't have the first clue on how to go about doing it, so any help/ideas would be greatly welcome!
NES/SNES emulators have netplay, but in my experience it's a bit shaky. Since they have to keep the system state synced over the network, they tend to either have laggy input or be somewhat choppy when being played over the internet rather than between machines on the same network. There are some clever netplay systems like GGPO for arcade games, but I don't know that there is anything especially great for NES/SNES. We could give it a shot though. Another reasonable alternative for the time being could be Nullpomino. Nullpomino does support Nintendo rotation system and can be tweaked to a reasonable approximation of the timings. T-Spins, Combos, Back-to-Back, and other extras can also be turned off for a pure 0/1/2/4 attack table, and hole randomization frequency can also be tweaked. Tetris + Dr. Mario's attacks looked _ridiculously_ clean in the Kevin vs. Mat video! We might want to come up with a community standard that's a bit messier. Here are some ideas: 1) Change On Attack like modern games (where each attack segment is randomized individually), 2) 30% hole change rate like Tetris DS (for something clean but not T+Dr.M levels of ridiculous tetris tennis), or 3) 90% or 100% hole change rate (for pure, hardcore, TetriNET/Cultris/Blockbox style dig fighting). Nullpomino does not currently support gnarly randomization schemes like NES Tetris B-Type Heights or Microsoft Tetris, but maybe that's something to work toward in the future.
