I work at a small but fantastic place in the middle of Montana fixing up computer hardware of all kinds. Most of the time, this involves desktop PCs, laptops, and rackmount servers, but every so often a unique item comes by that makes you wonder what all it’s capable of. Today, this item was a state lottery ticket machine — the kind you’d find on the checkout counter of any Quick-E-Mart style establishment. While the machines used ancient computer hardware and had no trace of lottery related data (who wouldn’t look?), I did spend a couple minutes testing it and, naturally, launching Doom! The LCD on the machine was monochrome and only used the top left quarter of the video output, meaning the lottery system was a pretty big hack itself. With some configuration, video could probably be sized to use the available space, but I didn’t want to put more than a couple minutes into hacking, as this is work, after all.

Tonight’s winning numbers are: I, D, D, Q — and the PowerBall number — D. (huh?) Click below for larger images at Flickr.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.