How many of you have played Neverball raise your hands? If you actually raised your hand you get a cookie. If you haven’t played Neverball and you have a Macbook you’re going to start playing because this tutorial makes it *so* much more fun! We can make use of the motion sensors built into the Macbook hardware to allow us to play physical neverball.
Activating the driver
We’ll need to load the proper module into the kernel for this to work. We can do that using this command:
sudo modprobe applesmc
If you want this module to automagically load at boot time you can also use this command:
echo applesmc | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
Launching Neverball
You’ll now want to pick up a copy of the game Neverball which is available in the repositories.
sudo aptitude install neverball
Now launch the game (you’ll find it in your Games menu, or via the command neverball). Select “Play”, select your difficulty level and start the game. Now, here’s the best part, pick up your Macbook to play. Trust me, pick up the macbook and tilt the actual laptop to control tilting the floor within the game. Now that’s playing games with your laptop!
For the rest of you that want to play but don’t have the motion sensors you can just use your boring old mouse to play. Enjoy!
