I am going to do my very best to try and get the tournament system running by next week. At any rate it looks like the schedule is going to be full for the tourney weekend but if anyone wants to try and post a score then I should be able to do this.

Anyways at the very least if you want to get yourself signed up, I can bring my laminator to Adams and laminate your cards for future use. Just need to print it out.

http://www.mypinballs.com/tournament/admin/users/add.jsp

The reason that only one model of NIC works is probably due to the fact that the software is a custom OS, written from scratch. As you know, no hardware will work in an OS unless there's a driver for it (there are some exceptions like keyboards, and text mode on the monitor). They obviously only bother writing drivers for hardware they actually use.
If WMS had decided to go with linux or another open OS, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to use any hardware you wanted, including motherboard and CPU.
This is why the nucore project is so cool. They're reverse engineering the custom OS (the name escapes me at the moment), so that they can write their own games and drivers, pretty neat stuff. I kinda want to get my own pin2k just to get in on the hacking. (I'm an embedded linux developer)

Quoted from jonny_eh

They're reverse engineering the custom OS (the name escapes me at the moment)

I believe it's called Xina...

D

Quoted from Menace

I believe it's called Xina...

D

Kind of, just trade the "a" for a "u". It wasn't written from scratch, well let me clarify that XINA layer may have been but the OS XINU wasn't. I give the Williams/Midway/Bally guys tremendous credit for being some of the greatest game makers in the world but on this one they may have had a better legal department than programmers. XINA is founded on PC-XINU. An open source OS that had one advantage over Linux in that, unlike Linux, you were not legally required to share the changes that Williams needed to make to the source code to suit their purposes.

http://www.pinrepair.com/pin2000/xina.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XINU

Why is this of any importance? Well I guess in any future development on this platform it is good to know it's foundation is open source. I just wonder if they can license the layer if it's founded on an open source platform, or is it like licensing an application?

The bigger question is WTF does the function "zombie process-id" do?

OK, the question begs to be asked,,,,with all this exploring of the computer basis to this game by you guys....is anybody actuallly just PLAYING the game????????? !

I just had to...

ME

Quoted from medvet

OK, the question begs to be asked,,,,with all this exploring of the computer basis to this game by you guys....is anybody actuallly just PLAYING the game????????? !

I just had to...

ME

Nah. Game is crappy. Don't bother with it.  

Quoted from necro_nemesis

The bigger question is WTF does the function "zombie process-id" do?

Wikipedia is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process

Might have been useful had they produced MB in Pin2K......



I am thinking about how to route the reader without modifying the coin door. Either that or I would be in the market for the metal portion of the door if anyone has a spare to sell.

If they had used linux, they wouldn't have necessarily needed to release their code. They would only need to release their modifications to the kernel, which is licensed under the GPL. If they just wrote drivers or modules, then they could have kept them secret, like nvidia does with their linux drivers.

Back in the stone age when they were designing pin2k, linux didn't have real-time functionality yet, so they probably would need to heavily modify the kernel. If Stern were to design their next gen pin now, linux would be a no brainer, especially since the (non-existent)competition isn't about to steal their source.

Now if WMS chose linux, and released their source code, we wouldn't have such a problem reverse engineering the system now Why didn't they think ahead?!

While googling around for pinball and real-time, I came across this cool paper. Don't bother reading it unless you're a computer geek. Quote from the paper: "Pinball machines are designed to stimulate humans." Anyone who questions whether or not comp sci people are scientists just need to read that line.

Quoted from jonny_eh

While googling around for pinball and real-time, I came across this cool paper. Don't bother reading it unless you're a computer geek.

Well I am sure that if you can read a postscript file, it automatically makes you a computer geek.

For (almost) everyone else, PDF and other info is at:  http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~pinball/

Quoted from Monkeybug

Well I am sure that if you can read a postscript file, it automatically makes you a computer geek.

For (almost) everyone else, PDF and other info is at:  http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~pinball/

Ya, didn't think of that. I'm using linux as my desktop and the file just opened up as easily as a pdf.

From Marvin, it looks like they wanted to modify the kernel for multithreading while this was already incorporated into XINU.