What Makes A Gaming Machine Tick?

I found this arcade game, the world's largest, at scifi.com this morning. You need to climb up on stepladders for crying out loud!

Anyway, it got me thinking a little about gaming machines in general as an embedded device and pondering again "what does a gaming machine need from an OS to make an optimal platform?"

Like most embedded devices, it's all about the device experience, and that pretty much comes from the 3rd party applications and the APIs provided by the OS. So for gaming devices what are the device experiences that are most important for the general device category?

I know rich multimedia through video and audio is a must have. So is probably security, possibly DRM or a secure channel to a back-end service and fast disk i/o.

Then there is serviceability, how do these devices usually get serviced?

Also, there's Touch capability and perhaps you'd prefer an x64 arch?

What other features should we be thinking of in regards to a typical gaming device to help ensure we're optimizing the feature work in the right areas?

- Andy

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• Anonymous
  August 27, 2009
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