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November 14th 2006 at 3:35 pm in It can play games too! I was just reading this relatively old dissection of these voting machines that coincidentally we will vote on in the upcoming elections.
It started with what we thought was a very obvious statement. We claimed on our website that
the Nedap was just another computer, and that as such it could just as easily be programmed to play
chess or to lie about the election results. We didn’t think more of it until Jan Groenendaal, placed a
document 9 on the Nedap/Groenendaal website to talk about our website “Wij vertrouwen
stemcomputers niet”. In it, he says: “[...] And with regard to the claim that our machine can play
chess: I’d like to see that demonstratedâ€.
So, obviously, these guys did it:
So obviously, one of our first goals now that we had access to the device was to make it play chess. Apart from proving our point, programming it to do this would also confirm that we knew everything we needed to know about the hardware before getting into the election fraud business. After having learned roughly how the hardware worked we used a gcc 68000 crosscompiler to create a Nedap IO-library containing functions to initialize the system, write data to the display, read the keyboard, and write debug messages to the UART. Together with newlib, a small clib implementation, we then managed to compile and run Tom Kerrigan’s Simple Chess Program (TSCP) 10. This was non-trivial only because we had to squeeze out quite a few tables to make it run using only the available 16 kBytes of RAM. Getting the chess pieces to magnetically attach (the keyboard is mounted at an angle) was also not that easy since the foil switches are stuck to a plastic base. We ended up using using 2 and 5 Eurocent coins underneath the paper, taped such that we could press the underlying foil switches with the edge of the coin.
Hahahaha, never tempt a technician… 
BTW the whole report itself is quite an interesting read if you’re interested in that shit.
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