Here's the brief summary of my situation. I'm doing an extra credit project for school and I want to make a game for it. I'm going to create a game using GameMaker on the computer. I'll save the game on a laptop and bring the laptop to school. I'll hook up a projector to the laptop so that everyone can see it.

 

If all of this goes right, I still have a problem. I want four people to play at a time. Any suggestions how I can do this on a cheap budget? I think I have a Dreamcast still around, with four controllers. Is it possible that somehow I can hook up the four controllers to the game and have four people play the game at once? I think GameMaker can do that, but I'm not too sure about that. I'm just worried about if it's possible to hook up the controllers. I remember the days when I played games with a joystick, but I think I'll need more than just 3 buttons.

Actually, I think all this is fantasizing is improbable. I need to brush up on some basics of the Games Factory and see what I can do. The Games Factory can do 4 players, 2 on joysticks, one on the keyboard, and one on the mouse. Whether or not a laptop can hold the two joysticks is now my concern and how much the 2 button joysticks will cost me.

If it was a standard desktop PC then you could just plug a few cards into the PCI slots and do it that way. With a laptop it's obviously different.

 

A 2 button joystick shouldn't cost too much.

 

As for getting them into the laptop, well, if you could get USB joysticks then your laptop should have 2 USB ports (unless it's really old).

What's PCI and USB mean?

PCI is an interface for extra things (like a wireless card) to interact with your computer.

USB is a plug, the little ones on the back of your laptop that you plug a joystick into.

What's PCI and USB mean?

 

Those are acronyms for Peripheral Component Interconnect and Universal Serial Bus respectivley.

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

You could buy a 'playstation joypad to USB converter' they take two controllers for each USB port, providing you have two, and you know a couple of people with playstations, you're away. The joypads have more than three buttons, and you can get them quite cheap on E-bay.

Good point Snail, my friend actually just did this with Fifa 2006 (I think it was that, or maybe it was Pro Evo... wtvr, it was a new game!) and he basically connected a standard playstation controller into his computer using a special converter you can buy cheaply in shops.

 

Mind, I don't know if this GameMaker program would be able to use that as an input device, mind the computer treats the playstation controller as a standard joystick so you should be able to make it work.

How about a cheapie $10 USB hub and find 4 $5-15 USB joypads...