Ultrapin

[ark_ader]

I went into my local arcade today called Coral Island.  I live in Blackpool UK and it is the largest arcade/gambler establishment around.

Since the change in law about no smoking in these venues, I figured it would be a nice change to see which types of video games have survived the trash skip and are taking money in. I'm very anti-smoking so the place was off limits until just recently.

I came across 2 Ultrapins and the whole idea of the contraption amazed me.  I always wanted to make a cab that had a widescreen display sat flat in a box running Visual Pinball.  And there it was.  Well kinda.

Now I have looked and did a search on the message boards for this machine and found: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=62370.40

This was pretty cool and answered many of my questions.  One question still eludes me: 

Can I do the same with Visual Pinball?

I can pretty much figure the screen orientation via screen rotation, but how would one get the emulated LCD display to output on a real led or lcd display board?

I like the force feedback on the Ultrapin machine after pressing the buttons and the plunger feature was so cool.

Last month I took a trip back home to Las Vegas and located the Pinball Hall of Fame.  I spoke to one of the operators in there (not the owner) and suggested the Pin Mame route, and there was no interest (don't blame him as he has all those pins to play with) but to play the originals. 

If you are ever in LV check them out.  Major cross streets are Pecos and Tropicana near the Tropicana Cinema.  They have one of those Ms Pacman retro cabs with 50 odd games.  Man that machine looked so cool.  Apparetnly $3500 at Costco.....

When I saw the Ultapin today it made my project viable again.

Is it possible to recreate the same machine but just using VP and Pinmame?

With the new LCDs out 2ms and faster, would there be a lag like on the Ultrapin?

If so how would one go about it?

[Kangum]

visual pinball does not like to be in portrait mode. at all. i have heard people say that version 6 supports it. wich is only partially true from what i have seen with my own experimentation. there was alot of crashing also on exit. a known bug with vp 6.
the bottom line is the table is badly distorted in vp when you rotate the monitor.

it has been done before, but only heavy manual edit of tables on a table by table bases adjusting the angle and such.

pinmame on the other hand has no problem at all using a seperate display for itself. in fact when you set it up there is a option for this right below where you set the paths.

so at least that part of the table looks properly.

there is a sticky on the visual pinbal forum specifically for this discussion as it comes up often if you want to look for more info.

[bsellers100]

see this thread over at vpforum.
http://www.vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36732
a guy in that thread made his own Ultrapin and it looks COOL.  However, he then took down some of the pics because somebody was harrassing him.  It is possible to flatten out the viewing angle if you use an older version of the software.

[Kangum]

all versions let you change the inclination and field of view. dropping a table flat doesnt solve the problem. in fact it makes it worse. droping the table flat causes the table to look like its 30 feet long and 2 feet wide. this is the problem with vp is it doesnt scale right when rotated.

each table has to be tweaked manually the inclination and field of view.

[ark_ader]

Excellent!

I only want Funhouse and Black Knight, so that couldn't be so hard.

Thanks guys I will check out those links.

There is a 14" Widescreen for sale at www.ebuyer.com for £60.00 which looks the part.

Any ideas on the emulated forced feedback on the flippers?

Thanks!

[AlexKidd]

I've been thinking about/ looking into building something like this
http://www.tab.at/tab/en/Desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-31/27_read-7

I really like the way it looks. Seems like adding in some force feedback shouldn't be too hard for the flippers. The bumpers might be hard to simulate unless the program gives some sort of output.

[AlexKidd]

My Nvidia video card has a function to flip the screen however you want, which makes it easy to run stuff in portrait or landscape mode as long as the program you want to run supports the correct resolutions. I've messed around a bit with future pinball and it will run at whatever resolutions my monitor reports it can use.

[ark_ader]

I want to build a bartop Pinmame that will fold up.  I canot think if there would be any issues in doing this to the LCD, but the Ultrapin as definately given me the kick up the  I needed to get this project started.

[telengard]

I've been wanting to do something like this for a long, LONG time.  A few have done it but the software itself (Visual Pinball and Future Pinball) both aren't 100% cabinet friendly yet.  The table mentioned earlier that had been removed from the forums involved hand tweaking each Visual Pinball table which takes a lot of time and also you have to run software to flip the image which is a HUGE performance hit.  Ideally the software itself could flip the image in the desired orientation before blitting it to the screen.  Future Pinball supports this but due to the perspective it seems to not fit into the full screen correctly.  Changes are coming in FP to support dual head displays for showing the backbox on a different monitor.  Not having PinMame support in FP you'd be limited to games that do not use roms (although a good Cyclone table exists).

I've been working w/ one of the developers of Ultrapin on a new software application that *will* be cabinet friendly.  Progress is moderate but a lot is in place but WAY more to go.  It's a lot of work building a program that builds programs.   

One thing mentioned was LCD refresh speed.  The bigger issue is motion blur.  Supposedly w/ the new higher refresh rates (120Hz) this is less of an issue.  I have yet to do any testing.

~telengard

[theCoder]

Future Pinball works for me.  On my Timesink project, I'm only going to have 20 or so Mame games, but many more Future Pinball titles.  I wrote Chris at Future Pin, and he mentioned it can support rotation, but he has not exposed the feature in the UI.  He also mentioned the second monitor / backboard feature will be released "soon".  The utility iRotate works well on my desktop with FP.  A new Nvidia card is on the way and its drivers support rotation also.  The FP tables do not look distorted when rotated vertically.

I too am thinking about building a dedicated video pinball cab.  One of my local operators has a pin that was in a fire.  Upon further investigation, I decided against using it.  The frame is too large for the display technology available today.  I thought about using the legs, coin door, tilt mech, front bar, and plunger on a custom frame, but he wanted $150 for all.  I would do it, but all the metal is now rusted from the water used to put out the fire. 

The new wide format displays will work well.  Unfortunately they are still pretty expensive.  Yesterday I went to checked them out.  Frys has a 24" wide for $450.    24" is still a bit too small for what I had in mind, but hopefully they will get bigger and cheaper by the time I finish Timesink.  The problem is going to be getting the proportions to look right.  The height is pretty much fixed.  The width will be in the ballpark.  The depth of the box, and the height of the back display are going to take some work to get to look right.  Or maybe we just throw tradition out the window and go with "form follows function".  Why be constrained by tradition?

What is the force feedback feature you spoke about? 

Go man, go.  Build this thing.  I'll be right behind you.

[theCoder]

Whoa, Ultrapin looks cool.  $4900 is a bit out of my price range.  On EBay, they have a bunch of 32" widescreens for under $500.  Still a bit pricey, but... 

[telengard]

Future Pinball works for me.  On my Timesink project, I'm only going to have 20 or so Mame games, but many more Future Pinball titles.  I wrote Chris at Future Pin, and he mentioned it can support rotation, but he has not exposed the feature in the UI.  He also mentioned the second monitor / backboard feature will be released "soon".  The utility iRotate works well on my desktop with FP.  A new Nvidia card is on the way and its drivers support rotation also.  The FP tables do not look distorted when rotated vertically.

I too am thinking about building a dedicated video pinball cab.  One of my local operators has a pin that was in a fire.  Upon further investigation, I decided against using it.  The frame is too large for the display technology available today.  I thought about using the legs, coin door, tilt mech, front bar, and plunger on a custom frame, but he wanted $150 for all.  I would do it, but all the metal is now rusted from the water used to put out the fire. 

The new wide format displays will work well.  Unfortunately they are still pretty expensive.  Yesterday I went to checked them out.  Frys has a 24" wide for $450.    24" is still a bit too small for what I had in mind, but hopefully they will get bigger and cheaper by the time I finish Timesink.  The problem is going to be getting the proportions to look right.  The height is pretty much fixed.  The width will be in the ballpark.  The depth of the box, and the height of the back display are going to take some work to get to look right.  Or maybe we just throw tradition out the window and go with "form follows function".  Why be constrained by tradition?

What is the force feedback feature you spoke about? 

Go man, go.  Build this thing.  I'll be right behind you.

Cool, these are a few of the features that will make it easier to have in a cabinet.  I wonder if he plans on adding (is it orthogonal, can't remember the term, ortho something) so that the entire table can fill the screen in both dimensions and be rectangular?  Right now the perspective seems to cut off the bottom right and left (near the flippers).  It probably would down on the 3d-ness of it all somewhat but would be perfect for a cabinet.

~telengard

[ark_ader]

Future Pinball works for me.  On my Timesink project, I'm only going to have 20 or so Mame games, but many more Future Pinball titles.  I wrote Chris at Future Pin, and he mentioned it can support rotation, but he has not exposed the feature in the UI.  He also mentioned the second monitor / backboard feature will be released "soon".  The utility iRotate works well on my desktop with FP.  A new Nvidia card is on the way and its drivers support rotation also.  The FP tables do not look distorted when rotated vertically.

I too am thinking about building a dedicated video pinball cab.  One of my local operators has a pin that was in a fire.  Upon further investigation, I decided against using it.  The frame is too large for the display technology available today.  I thought about using the legs, coin door, tilt mech, front bar, and plunger on a custom frame, but he wanted $150 for all.  I would do it, but all the metal is now rusted from the water used to put out the fire. 

The new wide format displays will work well.  Unfortunately they are still pretty expensive.  Yesterday I went to checked them out.  Frys has a 24" wide for $450.    24" is still a bit too small for what I had in mind, but hopefully they will get bigger and cheaper by the time I finish Timesink.  The problem is going to be getting the proportions to look right.  The height is pretty much fixed.  The width will be in the ballpark.  The depth of the box, and the height of the back display are going to take some work to get to look right.  Or maybe we just throw tradition out the window and go with "form follows function".  Why be constrained by tradition?

What is the force feedback feature you spoke about? 

Go man, go.  Build this thing.  I'll be right behind you.

Cool, these are a few of the features that will make it easier to have in a cabinet.  I wonder if he plans on adding (is it orthogonal, can't remember the term, ortho something) so that the entire table can fill the screen in both dimensions and be rectangular?  Right now the perspective seems to cut off the bottom right and left (near the flippers).  It probably would down on the 3d-ness of it all somewhat but would be perfect for a cabinet.

~telengard

Is that orthorectification?

I used to work in Aerial Photography and our high altitude maps were orthorectified, meaning the mosaic of images sized to the curvature of the earth, thus making the image look flat, would be in the same thinking.  Curved playfield to the image of the LCD would give the playfield more depth and give the table a better perspective.

Looking back at the VP threads the playfield was cropped and tweaking had to be done to keep the walls of the table within the boundries of the game.  Errr... I don't think I can tweak VP to do that, but there are some examples floating around the net that show promise.

I had another go on the Ultrapin to get some more ideas, and to play funhouse back in a real arcade (even if it looked cartoonish) was a real blast.

I am so doing this project!

[theCoder]

Orthorectified ?  Sounds painful.

What does the force feedback feel like?  Short bursts of vibration?  Small pops?   Are they regionalized, as in, when you use the left flipper you feel it on the left side?  I'd love to look inside one of those to see what mech(s) they use.  Its either done with a motor with eccentric, or a solenoid like a door bell ringer.

What actions cause the feedback?  Flippers and plunger make sense.  Others?   I doubt VP generates outputs for software conditions (ball hitting a kicker, knock-down resets, etc.  That would be awesome.  Sorry for all the questions, but you really got my mind racing with ideas.

[Donkey_Kong]

I'm very interested in a homemade custom dedicated VP table as well. I recently made a post at the new Retroblast on the subject.

http://www.retroblast.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=29&topic=308.0

A long time ago I tried playing cyclone (favorite pin) on my 20" wide monitor. Seemed to work fine...Pic attached.

[ark_ader]

Orthorectified ?  Sounds painful.

What does the force feedback feel like?  Short bursts of vibration?  Small pops?   Are they regionalized, as in, when you use the left flipper you feel it on the left side?  I'd love to look inside one of those to see what mech(s) they use.  Its either done with a motor with eccentric, or a solenoid like a door bell ringer.

What actions cause the feedback?  Flippers and plunger make sense.  Others?   I doubt VP generates outputs for software conditions (ball hitting a kicker, knock-down resets, etc.  That would be awesome.  Sorry for all the questions, but you really got my mind racing with ideas.

Like a solenoid but with weight.  When you press it you get a sample of a flipper and vibration that echos inside the cab. I think I will ask VR how they did this as they seem to be buddies with the Visual Pinball and PinMame crowd.  I heard that the Mame team is designing hooks for external output for emulated games, like Qbert's demise knock.

I saw a pic on the VP forums but you have to be logged in to view, so I hosted it at my site (apologies to the owner).  This is what I want to build:



How cool is that?