pinball ideas floating in my head

Ok, so to re-iterate, this is a long term goal that probably won't happen for a while, but everytime I think about it I get excited.  Probably the person that plants the idea in my head more than anyone is ben heck.  Oh no, it wasn't enough that you built a custom Bill Paxton pinball from scratch, now your making a custom pinball based on the TV show lost.  He mentions building custom I/O boards for handling all the lights / solenoids / scoring / display and I get discouraged.  If I were to ever build one, it certainly wouldn't have any intelligence.

I did find this video where a guy basically used the metal pinball and some wires to join contact, and the same IPAC board to interface keys, cept instead of joystick/buttons, your simply using the same terminal to press keyboard commands, which in turn makes sounds play in a free program:
http://www.soundplant.org/download.htm

Then I found an old video jeri elsworth made where she said when she was 14 and built her own pinball, and didn't know enough about electronics, she hacked a calculator (bypassed the buttons, and made traces to make the contact to press a button and then the plus key to add it).


I may totally integrate something like this too.  Granted it's not flashy, it's not keeping count of millions of points, but it's better than no scoring.  Like she says in the video, you would still need to block it from going the opposite direction so the logic doesn't get screwed up (+ 1 instead of 1 +).

Then I also came across this site:
http://www.millisoft.de/pinsys_en.html

Apparently some german college students have put in a lot of work to create exactly what I'm (and every other custom pinball builder dreamer) looking for.  It's an I/O board connected to a PC, "easily" configured software for controlling everything (lights, solenoids, scoring, display, etc).  They talk about text editors which I'm not keen on.  I tried creating a virtual pinball inside future pinball software and I just got lost (someone should write a book for dummies).  Also there doesn't seem to be any pricing on the site, so who knows what it costs.

Always been fascinated by marble machines, always thought it would be cool to create some sort of crazy multiball with a simple lift system like this:



Of course do you know what would be REALLY cool?  If someone somehow integrated features from this beloved classic animation from sesame street (would HAVE to play the song too):