Abstract

Abstract: The University of Southern California has recently created a Bachelor's Program in Computer Science (Games) and a Master's Program in Computer Science (Game Development). As part of this effort, we are currently working on creating 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. In Summer and Fall 2008, we performed a feasibility study with the objective to develop the computer interface between a PC and a recent Lord of the Rings pinball machine, the software to drive the interface, libraries that provide abstractions of this interface, and a program that uses these libraries to implement an engaging pinball game. In this paper, we describe the results of this successful feasibility study. 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.

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