Arcade Collecting > Pinball

PinKadia! The Ultimate virtual Pinball / Arcade / PC combo cabinet!

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pbj:
And side art.

thagerty:
Maybe I'll eventually get side-art if I can come up with a better name.... but I gotta save up for a VR headset for the simpit too....

thagerty:
Well, now it is time for more upgrades.... as a result this is what happens in the middle of a project upgrade... total mess everywhere which makes my wife sooooo happy!






I always wanted to add in a plunger and a big LAUNCH button.  Can't easily find either in Canada, and buying from the US is costly with our crappy CDN dollar and costly shipping.

So, I found a place in Ottawa that does repairs and sells parts called Pinball Medics.   

https://pinballmedics.ca/

Since I was taking my daughter to Ottawa Comi-Con, I was able to stop by his place and buy what I needed from him. He had everything except for the mounting plate for the plunger, which I didn't need anyway.  He's a great guy and had a fantastic Pinball collection which I sadly didn't have time to check out....  :(

Here's a video demonstration of my plunger setup:





Hopefully I can maybe make a couple of custom tilt-bobs to work as a digital nudge type of setup. Then, I'm off to update the control panel with a different button layout, a third 4-way joystick, and all three joysticks will have BAT tops instead of BALL tops.

After all this is done, its just a waiting game for all my parts to arrive from China, so I can install feedback via 10 solenoids. I'll also be installing led strip lighting to act as 5 rgb flashers, addressable led strip lighting / matrix for animation, white strobes, and red / blue beacons (LED strobe versions).  Lots of work to do!

thagerty:
While waiting for my parts to arrive from China for feedback (solenoids, lighting, etc), I figured I would get some other upgrades done to the cabinet, now that the plunger is working.

After using the cabinet for a while, I really wanted to have a dedicated 4-way joystick for alot of the classic arcade games that really do need it. (Pac-man, Q-bert, Dig-Dug, and many more).  I also wasn't really happy with the "ergonomic" button layout. Yah, it was nicer for fighting games, but not for anything else for me personally. Also, in order for me to fit a third joystick on the control panel I would have to rearrange the buttons in order to have enough space. I also didn't like the ball tops, and the LED joysticks don't allow for easily changing the tops without reaching inside the cabinet.

Another thing I wanted was to eventually put in a spinner, but I needed to have a hole pre-drilled for it. So I have two extra buttons above the right joystick that can be swapped out with a spinner later on. I also put in a central "FIRE" button for those pinball games that use it (Star Trek, AC/DC, Alien Legacy, etc).  I also labelled every button with transparent labels from a cheap label maker. It worked surprisingly well, and you can't see the label unless you look real close at the buttons.




I decided to use a spare XBOX 360 gamepad (instead of the Logitech gamepad) for player one and the pinball controls. The main reason was that I wanted to have force-feedback outputs from the gamepad to use to create possible feedback options (solenoids, lighting) for Pinball FX2 and The Pinball Arcade in the future.  I also setup this controller so that the x / y potentiometer was completely accessible for the plunger in the cabinet. This gamepad was MUCH easier to wire up as it had only one common ground for all buttons, and the pads were larger and easier to work with.



Here you can see that I now have the entire control panel connected to two old school parallel db-25 cables for player one and player two, with a molex connector for the LED lighting. MUCH nicer than having all wires directly goto the gamepads. Yes, this involved soldering over 125 wires.... but now if I ever need to get access to the control panel or change / replace anything, I just unplug three easy to access cables.  Yes, its alot of work, and I could have used some other solutions instead of gamepads, but that would not have given absolute complete compatibility with ALL PC Games and emulators / pinball games without some hassles. I will NEVER have any problems with any game running properly on this cabinet using this.




Here you can see the extra trim I put around the side and front buttons.




I found that the LED lighting was too bright at 12V for the LED buttons on the arcade panel, so I used 5V instead. Combined with the non-lit BAT tops, I found this to be much nicer on the eyes while playing. My white LEDS for the bottom white buttons have died out, and I didn't have any spares. So I put in similar colour LEDS as the A B X Y buttons to match for now. They look almost the same in person and much nicer as opposed to the picture.




With the undercab and speaker lighting, it makes for quite the colorful display at night time.... can't wait for my addressable led strips!

thagerty:
I always try to find new ways to make use of the "4th display" area on my middle screen.

For MAME, I knew there were some cool programs out there that would let you see your control panel layout and other info for each game, either by pausing, etc..

I just wanted a way to show what the controls were for each game in MAME since there are so many different layouts. When someone else is using the cabinet, it would be nice not having to explain to them the controls for each game....but when I found CP-Wizard, I found exactly what I had wanted.

I am basically trying to setup as standard control panel layout for each control type for each game in CP-Wizard. I just made a background pic the size of my middle screen with the MAME logo at the bottom. Then I made the layouts I wanted and saved them as separate layouts.  Then I had CP-Wizard configured to use whatever layout for each control scheme as required.

I didn't need to have CP Wizard running in the background. I just had CP-Wizard do an Export-batch, creating control panel images for each game automatically with the correct naming of the files. These pics work with Pinball X as my DMD screen images for MAME. They display while browsing through each game and stay displayed while playing. Simple and easy to see to see while playing at any time.  I may just use this for PC Games and other emulators too.

Here's some pics of my current layout. Its simple, and probably not final, but works quite well.

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