[svlug] Coin box / Linux arcade games

[Jay Link]

Next, and entirely unrelated, has anyone wired an arcade-style coin box to
an X86 motherboard running Linux? What sort of interface do you use? What
are we talking about in regard to drivers?

Seems you could make your own arcade games & cabinets once this is
accomplished -- using Flash ROM in lieu of a hard disk or CD-ROM to
eliminate moving parts (aside from fans), a stripped-down kernel, and
having your game as the shell.

Or, forget a shell -- could the kernel be hacked to just start the game at
the end of the code at init/main.c ? The last lines look like this:

execve("/sbin/init",argv_init,envp_init);

Could you execve() a program (i.e., your game) instead? Would it then just
run until the game is unplugged?


This could be the start of something really fun!

-Jay L.