Electronic Voting Machine Hacked To Play Pac-Man

J. Alex Halderman and Ariel J. Feldman hacked a touchscreen voting machine to play Pac-Man, without breaking the machine’s tamper-evident seals.

J. Alex Halderman and Ariel J. Feldman  hacked a touchscreen voting machine to play Pac-Man,  without breaking the machine’s tamper-evident seals.
J. Alex Halderman and Ariel J. Feldman hacked a touchscreen voting machine to play Pac-Man, without breaking the machine’s tamper-evident seals.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the iconic arcade game, they reprogrammed the AVC Edge, a touch-screen DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting machine, to run Pac-Man.

They found by removing screws and opening the case of the electronic voting machine they could replace the software leaving the tamper-evident seals intact. The video below shows the Pac-Man  being played.

How did you reprogram the machine?

The original election software used the psOS+ embedded operating system. We reformatted the memory card to boot DOS instead. (Update: Yes, it can also run Linux.) Challenges included remembering how to write a config.sys file and getting software to run without logical block addressing or a math coprocessor. The entire process took three afternoons.
University of Michigan

Hardware photos can be seen on the website.

(After the 2008 primaries Virginia banned the electronic voting  machines. Two were purchased for $100.)

Author: Losillë
Mother, wife and kinda old.

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