Linux-powered coin-op games

[lykwydchykyn]

Last week I was staying at a hotel while visiting family, where they had several big coin-op games. One of them was some kind of African safari game (don't remember the name), and I happened to be around when it rebooted.

To my surprise, the boot screen revealed it was just a Dell Optiplex, and just before the screen went black I saw it mention booting to LiLo (the old linux boot loader).

Made me wonder how many of these modern coin-op games are just Linux on an x86 under the hood. Anyone have technical experience or insight with these kinds of systems?

[3rdalbum]

I imagine it was Big Buck Hunter. We have it down in Australia too, but I don't think anyone plays it; the hunting safari is not really an Aussie thing and I think a lot of people find it distasteful.

Shoot zombies or aliens or enemy combatants; but never shoot civilians or animals.

Anyhow, I believe those "60-in-1" retro cocktail arcade units run on Linux or Unix. Their bootup sequence takes quite a while and is text-based. Normally, a proper old-style arcade machine would come on nearly instantly due to the solid state electronics and the games running on bare metal; with those 60-in-1 units it seems that there's an operating system underneath, and I'm sure it's not Windows.

[forrestcupp]

I imagine it was Big Buck Hunter. We have it down in Australia too, but I don't think anyone plays it; the hunting safari is not really an Aussie thing and I think a lot of people find it distasteful.

That's kind of funny since a lot of the world probably stereotypes people from Australia by Crocodile Dundee. :)

[djsephiroth]

The "In The Groove" series is a proprietary version of the open-source Stepmania. If you ever see an ITG or ITG2 machine, you can bet it's got an old Linux box under the hood. I've had one freeze on me, and when it rebooted it showed the POST, then LILO, then a very familiar wall of log messages before firing up the actual game. iirc, they are older Fedora boxen.

A lot of arcade cabinets I have encountered contain Windows or Linux boxen, or a console. It is in many cases more efficient to set up and maintain commodity hardware than to mess with old-school arcade cabinet guts.

On the ITG machines - and in all likelihood, any arcade machine with USB ports for loading custom content - one can insert a bootable USB drive... but that might not be the sort of Linux-powered coin-op game you meant.