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2.6 Ton Pinball Machine
nmoog writes "Heres something you don't see everyday - The Southtyrol-game is an 11 metre, 2.6 tonne pinball "style" machine. Its intention? 'Provide an ironic and entertaining demonstration of how the advent of tourism shaped the landscape and economic habits in the small Italian province of Southtyrol.' And powered by Linux to boot. Um, as well."
Before it gets /.'ed, I mirrored it.
http://www.schaefer.nu/southtyrolgame/
Considering there's 7 megs of movies on the page, it might get /.'ed pretty quick :) so:
Southtyrol-game, powered by Linux
Clicca qui per la versione italiana di questa pagina
Merano - Italy, September, 24 2003.
Today was the official presentation of the Southtyrol-game.
The game is one of the worlds largest hand carved pinball style game machines. (Candidate for the Guinness World Records).
It weighs 2.6 tons, is 11 metres long, 2.6 metres high, has 16 user operated levers, 72 metres of pathways for ball travel, 33 moving scenes,
37 electric motors, 22 sensors and 16 audio speakers distributed over the entire game.
It took about one year to build the game.
The Southtyrol-game is located at the Touriseum, a museum dedicated to the history of tourism in the province of Southtyrol, which is located in Italy at the border with Austria.
The intent of the game is to provide an ironic and entertaining demonstration of how the advent of tourism shaped the landscape and economic habbits in the small Italian province of Southtyrol
What does a massive 2.6 ton wooden game have to do with Linux?
The audio system is powered by Linux!
There are dozens of motors and sensors that are operated by an industrial controller which is linked to the PC
with a serial cable. Click here for a simple diagram of how it works.
Everytime a ball passes sensors which are embedded in the pathways, the controller unit
animates a nearby object by turning on the related motor and simultaneously sends the sensor number
that was triggered through a serial cable.
That way the PC knows which audio samples it must trigger and route to the various speakers located on the
game board.
The requirements that make a linux based PC solution more appropriate than dedicated sound modules includes:
- low cost of multiple input and output soundcards
- flexibility in controlling customized samples, trigger times, volumes, sample lengths, playback orders, assignment to arbitrary channels, etc
- capability to play large samples at 44.1Khz and 16bit (CD quality).
With 512MB of ram and a 40GB hard disk (sw-raid1) drive the computer meets all these requirements.
The PC is just a standard Athlon box, for the audio we use the M-Audio Delta 1010 cards and for the audio API
we use ALSA.
Aditionally the PC stores on hard disk all the events (time stamped) that were triggered by the passing of balls.
That way we can evaluate usage patterns of the game, eg what sections people like most or what sections are harder
to reach.
Example movies of the game in action
(all movies in DIVX format, sorry for the bad video and audio quality, I recorded them using a digital camera with a builtin mic
that does only low quality mjpeg AVIs which were later converted to DIVX thanks to mencoder).
1) movie1.avi (1.6MB)
In this movie the ball enters into a scene where a deer and a hunter hidden in the forest. The hunter emerges from his hiding place in the ground to shoot the deer. You hear the gun shot which is followed by applause.
2) movie2.avi (1.3MB)
In this scene the ball passes near a farm where it causes the cows to move and triggers the sounds of animals like roosters, cats, etc.
3) movie3.avi (700KB)
Here, as the ball passes a busy road, you see trucks traveling along the roadway and hear the sounds of various vehicles.
4) movie4.avi (1.6MB)
In this footage the ball rolls into an Apres ski which is an igloo shaped bar located near the ski slopes. You hear people shakin booty to the disco music.
5) movie5.avi (1.5MB)
In this movie the ball travels past a flock of noisy sheep which, not by coincidence, are very much like the herds of tourists that populate the ski resorts.
Authors:
Teo Mahlknecht: Woodcarving, mechanics
Benno Senoner: Audio system powered by Linux (audio software development, hardware setup and optimization)
Otto Vinatzer: industrial controller
About other 10-12 people like electricians, carpenters etc contributed to make the game a reality.
If you have questions, need more informations just contact us.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
This site has been very usefull to me.
http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/index.asp
That's the Horta with little trees clued to it's back.
Seriously, it looks nice an all, but pinball to me always has had a basic format, board, thingies to make the ball do stuff, flippers, hole in bottom.
That thing lacks the essential qualities of a pinball machine. It's closer to Pachinko in my opinion....
Actually, a lot more is powered by Linux that that. The sensors you speak of trigger events on the Linux machine so that it plays the correct sound and can log the event. Then the Linux machine can be used to analyze playing habits, difficulties, etc. It's a very good implementation I'd say.
Linux doesn't have to do everything for it to be an impressive application of the software. He used what was best for each job and interfaced all of it together.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
This phrase really grates on my nerves. Game machines, PVRs, PDAs, etc, are not powered by Linux. They're powered by electricity. They run Linux among other software.
And while we're on the subject of word misusage -- Slashdot is for nerds, not geeks. Geeks are sideshow performers that do entertain people by doing disgusting things. Technophilic misfits are nerds. It's right there on the Slashdot logo ("News for Nerds"), but people persistently refer to nerds as "geeks" in the postings.
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