Last month's Dorkbot Vienna featured a killer talk on hacking video games and pinball machines by Martin Pichlmair:
summary: games are a defining medium of our time. the majority of them is produced by multinational corporations, designed to appeal to the mass audience, locked on drm-protected and region-coded data media, and sold, shrink-wrapped in plastic. yet resourceful hackers and artists are working on the liberation of this medium. serious games, homebrew games, and game art are results of their great efforts. martin pichlmair and his guests will present a number of game machine hacks – from a modified pinball machine dating back to the 70s to musical instruments running on the nintendo ds. let's crack open the game machine a bit further.
(Thanks, Johannes!)
