My fun hack this week… running Doom II on the Spike 2 platform used in recent Stern #pinball machines.
The main processor is an ARM Cortex A9 running an ancient version of Linux. Switches, including the flipper buttons, are managed by multiple microcontroller boards in the cabinet talking over a proprietary serial "node bus”.
Beyond cross-compiler hell, most of the work was writing a driver that speaks the node bus protocol and synthesizes virtual keyboard events.
Edited 64d ago