Arcade Machines
The arcade machines, aka Arcademia or Research Arcade is a long term project running in the first floor corridor of the Issac Newton Building. They are occasionally used for recruitment both to the School and the Computer Science Society.
Originally these were deployed as a project to gather data for experiments, the most notable project that came from the machines is paper Adi's Maze and the Research Arcade: A Long-term Study on the Impact of Gendered Representation on Player Preferences published by Christopher J. Headleand, Bethany Davies, and Benjamin Williams.
And after the arcade machines were stopped being used for research, they were converted into the Arcademia project, which used to promote student game development allowing students to make games for the machines.
And then in 2024, Matt F. as a part of the Computer Science Society, rewrote the launcher for the arcade machines in WPF and C#. He did this as two components the Updater and the Launcher.
Research Arcade Updater
This is a service that runs on the machines to manage the state of the launcher and ensure it is always at the latest version.
Research Arcade Launcher
This is the actual launcher window which allows users to launch the games. To exit this, alt+f4 then win+r and re-launch explorer.exe.
Computer
There is an ex-lab pc in the bottom of the arcade cabinets, this machine doesn't need to be all that powerful but should be powerful enough to run the arcade games the students make.