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Pinball 2000 + Ethernet = ...
Eric Priepke writes: "I have 2 "Pinball 2000" machines, both of which I've added ethernet to. Via that ethernet, it's possible to telnet in to the pinball machine and get to a shell. I'm using that shell to dump out a bunch of statistic information on the games, and then build a web page with a backend perl script. Any time my games are on, the local FreeBSD box notices and updates the web pages every 1/2 hour." The link is to a mirror. Really impressive hack. Revenge from Mars is among my favorite pinball tables. Since Williams is giving up on Pinball 2000, it would be sweet to see if we couldn't make new games out of the old hardware.
You can read information about the pinball 2000 machines here http://www.pinball.wms.com/pinball2000/home.html.
They appear to be run off a standard PC so a ethernet hack shouldn't be too hard.
I don't really mind double posts on
The mirror was my own idea. The real thing runs on my measly cable modem, and is essentially for my own amusement and the amusement of my friends that get to come over and play. I've seen plenty of things on /. get burned by traffic, so I figured I should put it on the biggest server I had access too.
-Eric
This reminds me of a pinball machine I saw at Burningman this year called The Visible Woman. There was no score keeping, and you basically played until the woman in the game made orgasmic sounds.I got to talking about the machine with the technical guy behind it, and it runs on linux. There are 10 or 11 triggers on the pinball machine, and each of those corresponds to a pin on a serial cable. There's a tiny computer hidden underneath the pinball console, and that emits the sound. There's no mention of the technical aspect of this game on the web site, so this is all from memory.
Here's a picture of people playing the game. You can see the computer underneath covered up by a blanket.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
This is so l33t! I'm gonna h4X0R into the machines and get r00t. Then I'll put my name at the top of the list with 999,999,999,999 points! I'm so k-rad, just wait and see!
Now, to make it complete, you need to add webcams to this setup!
We should be able to SEE you get that high score!
Pinball is not very fun.
I've owned an Addams Family machine for a few years, and I've never tired of it. I don't play it every day, but it has outlasted a number of (software) video games I have owned.
Some pinball makers had the right idea by adding lots of lights and pseudo-video-game displays to the machines, but they never took it far enough, and the same boring slap-the-ball gameplay was the core of the game. Sorry, but I'm not a retard. I need something a bit more challenging[...]
Saying that pinball is just "slap-the-ball gameplay" is like saying that video games are just "press-the-buttons gameplay" or that role playing games are just "rolling some dice". Although on one level it's true, you're mainly missing the point.
Note that people have managed to find entertainment for years with things as simple as a slab of wood and bunch of black and white stones (the game of Go). Also consider athletes; runners do nothing more than put one foot in front of another, but there's no shortage of people who find challenge and reward in it.
So instead of saying "X is for retards", try saying "X is not my cup of tea". Because acting like you're the final arbiter of all that is interesting is, well, for retards.
Only one thing i can say:
/]#
[root@pacman
I am !amused.
Do you have details of how you added the ethernet? Were the tables already running a *nix under the covers that you can shell into, or is it a more custom hack? Any other arcade machines you fancy having a go at?
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
I always wondered how many people actually read Slashdot...
If the pinball machines are designed to download information anyway, how exactly is this an 'impressive hack'? It seems like he's doing exactly what the designers of the machine expected: download play data and use it. What's to separate Bob and Joe's Circus of Fun's using these stats to determine their next purchase and this guy's posting his high scores on his website?
I don't get it.
Dancin Santa
Pinball. Heh, I remember when we used to play stickball in the streets and duck in and out of traffic. And then when pinball came out, our parents were happy to keep us out of traffic and in the penny arcades, hitting constrained balls instead of each other. Those were the days, I think.
Pinball is dying now, and it's little wonder why. Pinball machines have countless mechanical parts subject to mechanical wear and requiring mechanical replacements. All that banging around can equal a whole lot of wear and tear, and without vigilance, your shiny new quarter-eating machine is a worthless hunk of scrap. Your video machines, instead, don't need repair and can be upgraded with a single new chip. That's the power of the internet, you know.
I miss pinball already. It was much more real than video games. You were hitting a real ball with your real stick just like back in the streets of Brooklyn growing up with Jimmy and Pudge. When you scored a point, you got a reassuring *thunk*, and not another epileptic seizure like those pokemon games give you. One pinball machine used to be all it took to get a room moving and grooving, but now where are we? Typing away at our individual boxes with big screens and complete sensory deprivation. What would the Who's Tommy have done with a modern video machine? He certainly wouldn't have written a musical; that's what.
We need to keep pinball machines alive. We need to keep the knowledge of tuning them alive. Pinball repair is a necessary skill I'd hate to see us lose. Then, where'd we be?
Read the rest of this comment...
Someone else already pointed out some info, but as another former pinball 2000 programmer, I'll add a bit more...
The default webserver in a p2k machine only displays the pinball 2000 logo and the current high scores on the machine. Of course, those were just hacked in there in a couple days to show that http was working. All kinds of stuff could've continued to go into it, eventually you could wire it up online and get updates, tournament results, etc. etc.
There was unbelievable potential for everything that was going on at Williams Pinball at the time it shut down, it's most unfortunate that it'll never see the light of day. But life goes on.
keith
Eric, I understand the motivation to hack CSS/Tivo/iopener/whatever.., but what exactly motivated you to want to hack a pinball machine. Most of us want to hack devices that are copy protected or have their functionality limited by the corporation who built the device, but what advantage could you possibly gain by hacking a pinball machine? This may sound ignorant, but what were your motivations for this project?
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
The TINI from iButton is the shit for doing this sort of thing - $50 gets you a board that has ethernet, serial, loads of goodies, it's a joke to interface to, and it speaks Java, so it's easy to program, has a full suite of internet connectivity and you can do it in linux to boot! These things are a great deal, and offer all sorts of interesting possibilities with the addition of iButtons and the Java Ring, for instance..
I'm sure this stuff was covered on /., but I'm too lazy to look :).
..don't panic
This is a cool hack! I'm actually surprised it took someone this long to do it, as the P2K machines are heavily computer based. I would have thought this would have been done a while ago, though I suppose most people aren't up for experimenting with a $3,000+ machine.
/. has many users that would be quite capable of designing the video aspect of the game, but to engineer and produce a playfield and the "toys" would require a lot of material, production costs, and people with specialized knowledge in designing pinball playfields (which is a unique talent).
:)
Williams, who also owned the Bally name, made the greatest machines. Sega, Data East, Gottlieb, etc machines just don't have the right feel to them. I love the Williams/Bally line (I own High Speed and Pin*Bot, both from 1986, and I really want an Attack From Mars machine).
A lot of people were not impressed with the P2K set up. I played Revenge From Mars twice and I enjoyed it a lot! I don't know if it is something that I would get sick of, but I did find it fun. I think Williams did an commendable job of integrating the video display onto the playfield.
As for getting together to build another game, that would be quite noble, but I don't know how attainable. Obviously,
I know of one guy locally who DOES design machines for fun, and he has been featured on the Phoenix news stations for different things he's done. Maybe one of these days I'll ask him about what he feels the feesability of a P2K game is. =)
Great hack though!
The most interesting part of all of this is that I think this is the first tim I've seen someone braced for the /. effect... I'm not too much of an old timer, but is this a first? Did the /. crew actually suggest this to someone, or was it his own idea?
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
The real reason he decided not to put a webserver on his pinball machines is:
Too many hits will tilt the damn things!
---
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One thing that immediately comes to mind is the possibility of true head-to-head pinball. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to "bomb" the other player by executing special moves that turn off their ramps, or turns on magnets? The mind just boggles at the possibilities. So, while a shell and web-based statistics are a cool idea, do these people have any plans to do something *really* cool with this capability?
--ALex
Causation can cause correlation
As one of the Pinball 2000 programmers, maybe I can shed some light.
Pin2000 uses PC-Xinu as the basis of its core OS although we added a lot of functionality to it. This was the decision of Tom Uban who was the chief software engineer on the project and all-round hardcore superstar programmer in general. PC-Xinu already includes a TCP/IP stack, and he had already written a packet driver for one kind of Ethernet card because we did all our code and image downloads via ethernet during development. A really simple web server wasn't too hard to write on top of that - all the statistics it reports are already collected by the game and displayed on-screen in the administration menus.
We demoed another use of the TCP/IP stack at Pinball Expo in 1999, where we had a tournament automatically running. We produced barcode badges for entrants, they walked up to a game, swiped the badge in a barcode reader, played, and their score was recorded. We also took their picture with a webcam and printed it on the badge, and the games showed the current high score list including their digitised pictures on all the games during their attract mode (ie. while they weren't being played).
Graham