Arcade Collecting > Miscellaneous Arcade Talk
Build your own Pinball Machine
fredster:
I didn't even think about this project until I bought a Pinball. I had no idea how they worked, and really wasn't that interested until I had one.
I bought an '86 Gottlieb 'Genesis' machine http://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?any=genesis&search=Search+Database&searchtype=quick
Now I was at first put off by the complexity of the machine, but when I started tinkering with it, it doesn't look that tough to me to make a playerfield. As long as you have some parts, a person can figure a way to get it to work.
They didn't have computers when they made the first ones, so how hard can that be?
If anybody has seen a baby pac machine, even small pinballs can be really fun.
I started looking for sites that had homemade pinball machines. A couple of guys had figured out how to interface a really crappy computer to run the pop bumpers and slingshots and count the score.
If we were to compare, I was describing making a go-cart, not a car. I'm a tooling engineer, not a software engineer. These guys that came up with the drivers for the board didn't leave the software around.
A concerted effort by the boys here would blast this door wide open.
mp2526:
I hear you, however, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I'm looking to build a car, not a go-cart.
I believe you will have no problems building a simple playfield and for the most part getting it working pretty well, but I'm willing to bet that as you play it you will notice dead spots and places the ball just doesn't flow well. But, it will be more than enough just to play and I'm sure you would still enjoy it.
Yes, they didn't use computers to build pin playfields, but they also have years of experience and even the pros have built a few turkeys.
Like you I wasn't interested in pins until I started playing the Pinbot we have at work. It had been sitting around broken for a long time, so I opened it up to see what was wrong and it was just a loose wire on one of the flippers. Ever since then I've been hooked. I now own a few and am always looking for more.
I'm not saying don't go for it and I'm more than willing to provide any insight to what you are trying to accomplish.
fredster:
Chris,
I just got some time to look over your links.
These are very useful! Thanks so much!
mp2526:
Man, I totally forgot about PinMAME-HW.
http://www.pinmame-hw.com
When I was looking into this, they had just gotten started.
This isn't nessessarily creating a new custom pin but will allow you to use existing pin roms to interface a PC to real pin hardware.
This may just be the ticket to bring my foxy lady back to life if I can't repair the existing boards. My only concern would be that windows not being a real time OS I don't want to burn up any of the coils because windows decides to take some processing cycles to do some other task while in mid pop bumper activation.
SirPoonga:
--- Quote from: aristotle on August 18, 2004, 02:24:03 pm ---Might be hard to customize your own machine considering pinball machines require PCBs.
--- End quote ---
not really, the old pins were electrical/mechanical.
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