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USC Pinball Project: Reprogramming Pinball Machines

submitted by ant

1 decade 5 years 3 months ago

"We believe that teaching computer science hands on via the development of games helps us to motivate students to learn computer science. The University of Southern California (USC) has therefore created a Bachelor's Program in Computer Science (Games) and a Master's Program in Computer Science (Game Development), which not only provide students with all the necessary computer science knowledge and skills for working anywhere in industry or pursuing advanced degrees but also enable them to be immediately productive in the game-development industry. In this context, we have performed a feasibility study in Summer and Fall 2008 for a motivational project class on programming pinball machines, where the students interface a PC to an existing pinball machine and then re-program the pinball machine with a pinball game developed by them. Solid-state pinball machines basically consist of a computer that reads the switches and controls the lights, solenoids, speakers and the dot-matrix display. A pinball game is determined by the input-output behavior of the computer, that is, what outputs the computer activates and when it activates them in response to its input-output history. The pinball class will cover how to build a hardware interface to the pinball machine, how to design and implement the software interface for the low and high level real-time control of the pinball machine (including how to best represent the rules of the pinball game), and how to write the rules of the pinball game. The project team consisted of Daniel Wong (undergraduate student), Darren Earl (Master's student), Fred Zyda (Ph.d. student) and Sven Koenig (advisor). We used a Lord of the Rings pinball machine for our feasibility study. Our objective was to develop the hardware interface between a PC and the pinball machine, the software interface to drive the hardware interface, libraries that provide abstractions of this software interface, and a program that uses these libraries to implement an engaging pinball game. As far as we know, this is the first time that anyone has managed to control an existing pinball machine completely and re-program it with a new complete (but simple) pinball game. The students created the following video to describe their project and its results."

From http://idm-lab.org/project-n.html and http://www.retroblast.com/20090112729/Latest/Reprogramming-Pinball-Machines.php ...