head to head pinball

I always thought "Hey, you know what would be pretty cool?  a head-to-head pinball game.  Surely someone must have done that at some time?"

Well turns out someone has, but it's from a long time ago so it's pretty simplistic:


But then I found this.. a very RARE Joust pinball game:




Which is just AWESOME, especially with the sounds from the game

steel pinball test

Got my real deal steel pinball.  As you can see from the video below, it appears I have enough strength to pop the ball. Can't know for sure until I build a full size table, but so far it's looking good



Even though this actuator seems to be working out, I ordered a pair of what I believe to be higher torque and more weight driven actuators (more internal gears and higher rpm motor I believe).  It's rated as one that's applicable when more force is needed (heavier door), so the new ones should work that much better.  Picked up the pair for $13+shipping, which I don't think is unreasonable.  This is totally working out, which is better than I expected.

12v flipper proof of concept

Finally decided to mockup a very rough "proof of concept" using some scrap wood from my basement.  This is a flipper that is powered by an actuator from a automotive door lock as apposed to a solenoid.  Much simpler design, lower power.  I don't yet have a real pinball ball to test with (one on order), but it still looks somewhat promising even if I am using a tennis ball.

tommy boy pinball

Ok, so I started messing around with visual pinball.. Got frustrated (mostly because it's so old), but did manage to figure out how multiple flippers work in the scripts.  Turns out most of the same script tags work in future pinball (which is superior) for many reasons:
1. It's true 3d (camera can be moved
2. You can import custom 3d objects
3. It supports layers so it's easier to see levels
4. sounds are much easier to attach to objects

Anyway, although VERY rough right now, I did manage to get some graphics laid down and some sound effects imported to targets

One thing I've definately noticed while building a pinball virtually is that it doesn't take much to get a ball stuck without proper design. While I would love to just get my hands dirty and start building a physical table, there's definitely something to be said about prototyping first and working out the bugs.

Also whenever I DO get my real physical pinball machine started, they do in fact sell a diecast of the 67 GTX car that I could put right in the center of the playfield!

Got my actuator

So I hooked it up to a battery.  The good and the bad:
Good: I was worried I'd have to reverse the voltage to retract it.  As soon as I remove power, it retracts.  That means I can totally just wire it up to a button.
Bad: It's not quite as strong as I'd hoped, but it could possibly work.  That plus I think this is only a 2lb actuator, I can still buy a 10lb actuator for about $20.

Also regarding the soundboard, I figured out a much better way to do it than initially thought.  I got a Soundtrack shirt for christmas:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/interactive/a5bf/

which is $30 and has 20 seperate sound banks that stores on an SD card (I believe as long of a sound as you want).  If you add up $5 each for a card sound module I found previously x 20 = $100.  So if I buy another soundtrack shirt to hack, it would totally cover more than enough sounds for a pinball machine (plus everything is stored on a single SD card, which makes it easier to update sounds).

pinball in the house

Another reason why I love pinball.. Grew up with one in the house.  When I was probably 7-8 years old, beyond the fact that we had an atari 2600 and a vic-20 computer, my brother convinced my dad to buy a pinball machine.  Since we lived near chicago, there were plenty of places that sold old arcade equipment.  I'll never forget what that warehouse looked like, just rows and rows of video games, shuffle pucks, and pinball.  I remember my dad didn't want to spend too much money, but he didn't want to go too cheap and end up with a lemon.  He decided $400 was the most he was going to spend.  We decided on an evel knievel machine (because it ran).  I think we played it a few months before it started having problems.  I remember him having to replace some ROM chip on the motherboard quite a few times.  It would power on, but it wouldn't kick over, effectively making it in-operable.  After fixing it several times, and getting tired of having to do so, he finally gave up and ended up selling it.  Sorta wished he had kept it around, seeing how this pinball is worth a LOT more now that evel knievel is dead.  Everytime I play it (even in emulation) it still brings me back to being a little kid playing that in the basement.

Soundboard

So I realize there's no way I'm going to design an I/O board.  Don't have the time, don't have the patience, and I figure if it's too hard for me, it's probably hard for many others.  It's my intent to make the simplest pinball possible so that others might also build one when they thought they couldn't.

Initially I thought using an IPAC board connected to a PC with soundboard software might be the easiest, but this is also the most wasteful.  I mean your having to run a PC which will end up using at least 100W of power, plus boot time, plus cost of Operating system (if you want to be legit).  So then I thought what about those little recorders.  They have them in greeting cards, keychains, etc.  For each target that makes a noise, I could have one of these boards hooked up, and then have one of those rocker momentary switches activate it

Of course, most of these boards make you record with a crappy mic, and if you ever decided to replace all the sounds (new theme, updated sounds of current theme), you'd have to dig the boards out, re-record, install them back in.  Then I found this:


For $5 on ebay, you get a board with a removable memory chip (which sticks into a USB dongle), and depending on sample rate you can record up to 52 seconds (wave or mp3).  I figure this is probably the simplest and easiest way to add sound to a pinball without complicated logic.  I would probably nix the weak speaker and run every board into one main amp/speaker system so it sounded good.