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Was curious about one thing. On the Xinu website, under "Xinu in industry" in the 2000s, it says that the pinball game for Star Wars: The Phantom Menance uses X

Was curious about one thing. On the Xinu website, under "Xinu in industry" in the 2000s, it says that the pinball game for Star Wars: The Phantom Menance uses Xinu. So I looked up that pinball game. On the wikipedia page for the game [1], it says that it uses Pinball 2000 hardware. And on the wikipedia page for Pinball 2000 [2], it uses Xina (Xina is not Apple) and not Xinu. Is there another variant of the OS? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_I_(pinball) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_I_(pinball) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_2000

koz1000 8y ago
Pinball 2000 engineer here. The "Pinball 2000 hardware" setup was an ATX motherboard running a MediaGX CPU (x86 clone, it lives on as AMD Geode). It also had a custom PCI card for storage and sound DSP, and a secondary board connected by parallel port for driving lamps and solenoids. XINA was an application layer on top of XINU that handled the executive tasks of running a pinball machine, and also abstracted the various hardware features. We used Allegro as the graphics SDK. The name XINA was inspired by XINU, and was an acronym for "XINA Is Not APPLE". APPLE was the previous pinball programming system, no connection to the computer company.
- bitcoinmoney 8y ago
  So cool. This is why I always go to HN comments!!
- katastic 8y ago
  >We used Allegro as the graphics SDK. Wow! I keep finding Allegro in unexpected places. Great memories of learning to code games with it.
- ChickeNES 8y ago
  I'm curious, does the source code for XINA still exist?
  - koz1000 8y ago
    It does, but it's owned by whomever owns the Williams IP. I believe these days it's Scientific Games. SG isn't making pinball machines but apparently has licensed the code to an outside group to maybe remake old games or whatever.

koz1000 8y ago

Pinball 2000 engineer here. The "Pinball 2000 hardware" setup was an ATX motherboard running a MediaGX CPU (x86 clone, it lives on as AMD Geode). It also had a custom PCI card for storage and sound DSP, and a secondary board connected by parallel port for driving lamps and solenoids. XINA was an application layer on top of XINU that handled the executive tasks of running a pinball machine, and also abstracted the various hardware features. We used Allegro as the graphics SDK. The name XINA was inspired by XINU, and was an acronym for "XINA Is Not APPLE". APPLE was the previous pinball programming system, no connection to the computer company.

bitcoinmoney 8y ago
So cool. This is why I always go to HN comments!!
katastic 8y ago
>We used Allegro as the graphics SDK. Wow! I keep finding Allegro in unexpected places. Great memories of learning to code games with it.
ChickeNES 8y ago
I'm curious, does the source code for XINA still exist?
- koz1000 8y ago
  It does, but it's owned by whomever owns the Williams IP. I believe these days it's Scientific Games. SG isn't making pinball machines but apparently has licensed the code to an outside group to maybe remake old games or whatever.