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Get the CPU! Part I

Thanks to Lex, I've discovered the wonders of shivaSite and pinball emulation. Reminiscent of the MAME arcade machine emulation project, what you have here are a number of very dedicated people creating extraordinarily faithful virtual copies of classic and recent arcade pinball games.

Playing something like Terminator 2: Judgment Day on a computer is a little weird. On the one hand, the emulation software gets the physics exactly right. The bumpers and flippers, the table, and the ball behave just as you'd expect on a well-maintained arcade machine. On the other hand, you don't have depth perception working for you. It's a small, 2D representation of a large physical object, so it's harder to track the ball. I also forget to nudge the "machine" -- the idea of pressing a keyboard key instead doesn't gel for me yet.

During a singularly maddening week, this discovery actually helped me hold things together. Thanks, Lex.

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