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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
by 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 agoSo 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 agoI'm curious, does the source code for XINA still exist?
- koz1000 8y agoIt 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.