I started wiring up the other end of all these cables to the I-PAC Ultimate I/O I'll be using as an encoder, lighting controller, servo motor relay controller and general purpose robotics interface.
In the process, I discovered a problem.
This yellow Start button - man, look at the light leakage from the white LED behind it!
The degree to which it does not match the yellow Launch Ball button next to it is absolutely untenable.
What is this. I can't even.
I tore the button apart and swaddled the LED with yellow translucent tape.
Much better. Now they match:
Crisis averted. Project salvaged. I can now proceed.
Though my front box is preposterously shallow - there's a whole 1 1/8 inch in there before you hit the back wall - I thought it would be fun to retain some small bit of simulation. Since I've got a working coin door, the pinball service buttons should totally be inside it, like this:
To make that work, I had to saw off part of the factory bracket, then fabricate my own adapting bracket that fits inside and gives me four screws into plywood down below.
I've also been working on my wiring runs, it's less messy than it used to be. I still have a long way to go, though - some of you people on this forum make gratuitously nice wiring harnesses that put me to shame. This is at least less bad than it was, and I'll be doing a bit more to route it.
I'm also kind of tempted to put some art behind the coin door. Maybe a photograph of the inside of a real pin. Or just a wall of solid jumbled quarters.
Anyway, once I had pinball service buttons, I had to play with them, so I lashed up another mock-up. It was a chance to hack on the custom front-end software, too... and maybe a chance to sit down in a chair for a while, too.
Here's the custom front-end running in Pinball mode.
(The white masking tape line on the DMD monitor is the depth mark I plan to sink it to inside the backbox.)
Tables are selected with flipper buttons, they fade in and scale from the sides, the center one is fully opaque and much larger. The next two games in either direction are visible.
Fake DMD display shows a fake DMD-ified logo, and scrolls DMD-styled instructions along if you don't get the hint. I'm going to randomize among many Shapeshifter logos every time you go back to the menu, because I think it's charming if a machine named Shapeshifter doesn't stick to one visual theme there.
Pick a table with Launch or Start, and it loads up like so.
I have been tinkering a lot with the backglass configuration. I am discovering that I am really picky - most vpins seem willing to aspect ratio squish the backglass art, and that drives me up a wall. I had to add code to my front-end so that it overwrites the B2S resolution settings per table before launching, to allow me to micromanage how every single table on the list works individually.
I'm not using a real DMD because I want to be able to use that space differently in different tables. Here's where I'm going with it so far:
On tables like Scared Stiff, it's pretty easy - the art fits on the big backglass monitor, the DMD fits on the DMD monitor, that's the straightforward case. About half the tables turn out like that.
Cirqus Voltaire had the DMD down in the playfield. I'd like to keep that look. So for it, and for games that just had no DMD, I've carefully aligned the software position of the DMD panel to be centered, portrait, and below the backglass desktop, and I'm stretching the backglass across it. It's not perfect, you'll have the bezel lines cutting it, but I like the effect better than blanking the DMD panel out - and especially better than squishing the art.
Whirlwind is an example of a game where the backglass did a good job with 15-segment plasma lights. They look really nice. With a lot of careful finicky tinkering I've gotten the segment display to line up nice in the DMD section, and that again keeps the art above at the right aspect ratio. I lose the status lights below the segment display, but I think I can live with that.
That's about where I am right now.
(I made the mockup fully playable. That means I'm doomed, right?)