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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.
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...
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
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
"because it was there" more or less. It's really a snowball of inspiration that started with hearing that you could add an ethernet card to the system. I found one of the type it needed and hooked it up, just to play around with. The games include a little httpd of their own that ONLY shows high scores, and crashes after about a dozen hits or so. Dissapointed with that result, and seeing how much information could be had with the various shell commands, I thought it would be fun to make a page of the variety that _could_ have been done, had WMS and Pinball 2000 had more of a lifespan. Mostly, it was just for fun. -Eric
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