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OMG! A PC to Pinball Machine USB Interface.

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mark shaker:


--- Quote from: Benevolance on May 04, 2010, 12:55:07 pm ---
--- Quote ---How's the language? What are the options there?
--- End quote ---

Reading the site, it looks like you can pick a language of your choice. I don't believe it could possibly be that vague, sooo...


--- Quote ---Could you give us a review?
--- End quote ---

x2

--- End quote ---

This info provided by Gerry Stellenberg, the creator of the P-ROC, who is eagerly awaiting the approval of his arcadecontrols.com membership:

Regarding the software questions... we developed a low level API (open source, written in C/C++) that handles all of the low level communication with the P-ROC.  The API code is here: http://github.com/preble/libpinproc.  So people can write software in whichever language they want as long as they can talk to the C API.  The programmer can then issue commands like (shooter_coil.pulse() or lamp.schedule()) to make things happen on the playfield.

We have an example program showing how to interface to the board in C here: http://github.com/preble/libpinproc/blob/dev/examples/pinproctest/pinproctest.cpp.

We also have a feature rich, pinball software environment called pyprocgame.  It's open source and written in Python.  It is here: http://github.com/preble/pyprocgame.  This already handles most of the general pinball game functional (game starting/ending, player tracking, ball tracking, ball-trough logic, ball-save, ball-search, lampshows, coil driving, switch management, DMD text/animation rendering, etc).

The pyprocgame code comes with a sample starter game showing how to get started.  It is here: http://github.com/preble/pyprocgame/blob/master/games/starter/starter.py.  This starter game is completely playable, but there are no rules.  So you can start a game (even a multiplayer game), play through 3 balls, etc, but it won't activate any modes or special features.

We also have a custom Judge Dredd application that has a complex, commercial quality ruleset.  It is written to run on pyprocgame, and can be found here: http://github.com/preble/JD-pyprocgame

Everything we do is open source, and we have a number of people using the P-ROC in their own custom machines and others helping with the JD project.

We also just got pinMAME support working.  So if the P-ROC is in a real machine, you can play the original software on the machine by running pinMAME on the host computer.  It communicates properly with the real machine through the P-ROC board.  So we can choose to run our custom JD software or the real JD software by selecting which software to run on the host computer.

Feel free to visit the forums at http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum to see the ongoing discussions about the board and software.  I'll try to answer more questions as they arise here.

- Gerry


Q*Bert_OP:


--- Quote from: Benevolance on May 04, 2010, 12:55:07 pm ---
--- Quote ---How's the language? What are the options there?
--- End quote ---

Reading the site, it looks like you can pick a language of your choice. I don't believe it could possibly be that vague, sooo...


--- Quote ---Could you give us a review?
--- End quote ---

x2

--- End quote ---

Well, you can pick pretty much any language you want. I decided to begin in Python. That's what many of their tools are written in, for the time being. I have 2 years of training in Java and C++, so picking up Python was not all that hard. It's very similar except some of the syntax is a little simpler in Python.

I can't really give a detailed review. A couple months ago, Gerry was having a release party, so I got to see the Judge Dredd they've been working on in person. Being that their program isn't near complete, and I just started writing mine, I can't say much about the board, other than it does what it's supposed to do. My board has not been installed in a machine yet; my program is no where near ready, and I don't have my playfield built yet.



Havok:


--- Quote from: mark shaker on May 04, 2010, 03:58:44 pm ---We also just got pinMAME support working.  So if the P-ROC is in a real machine, you can play the original software on the machine by running pinMAME on the host computer. 

--- End quote ---

OK, now it just went up a few notches in the coolness factor...

gstellenberg:

Thanks Mark for posting this.  

If anybody has any other questions about the P-ROC or the open-source tools we're developing for pinball game development around the P-ROC, let me know.  There are a number of people using P-ROCs for their fully custom machines, and others are using them to retheme existing machines.  The interface library and tools are still maturing, and we are happy to hear suggestions on new ways to enhance them.

- Gerry

The Habbler:

So I am assuming this is how they built Bill Paxton Pinball?
http://hackaday.com/2010/03/17/bill-paxton-pinball/

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