That's How I Roll! (Skeeball build)

[nickels]

Glad you are still going! I gave up on creating new games for my mini copycat build. Flash is dead and I am not starting over from scratch. Mine is where it is, and it has enough playable games to make the build worth while.

I LIED! I'm back. I found Flash software for my Laptop so I made a new game for my Skee Ball build called Ice Ball. It is basically an Ice Ball clone using Mortal Kombat as the theme:

At the end you get an audio clip of SubZero saying something random based on how much you scored. It's basically original skee ball with the scores x1000.

I just upgraded to a full LEDWiz from the +GP so I am going to rewire all my LEDs to be full color instead of just red/blue (and purple). I'll have to post a video of all of my games as I've added saved scores and have improved my lighting effects greatly. I thought I was done, but I guess not!

[Entropy42]

Nickels and purplestuff, you guys both do such amazing artwork for your software.  I have code that runs 10ish games and controls my LEDs, but the actual games look like you are playing a fancy Excel spreadsheet    If either of you ever are willing to release some of your artwork, please hit me up.  If I was gonna start over now I think I'd control the whole thing from a Raspberry Pi.

[thatpurplestuff]

Nickels and purplestuff, you guys both do such amazing artwork for your software.  I have code that runs 10ish games and controls my LEDs, but the actual games look like you are playing a fancy Excel spreadsheet    If either of you ever are willing to release some of your artwork, please hit me up.  If I was gonna start over now I think I'd control the whole thing from a Raspberry Pi.

Haha thank you for the kind words!  I've been very quiet on here, but actually I have been pretty busy on the software side of things.  Starting in late 2022, I have been rewriting my software from scratch in Unity/C#.  Flash's ActionScript2 was pretty much a dead language when I STARTED writing the software years ago (in retrospect, veeeerrrrry bad decision on my part haha). Adobe killed Flash long ago and now you can't even download Flash Professional CS6 to update things anymore without jumping through hoops, so I figured I was on borrowed time and it was time to either do a complete code overhaul or scrap the project altogether.

Getting proficient in Unity has been a pretty brutal learning curve for me, but there are at least enough similarities between C# and AS2 that it wasn't like starting COMPLETELY from scratch.  The hardest parts haven't really been getting the games to be functional, it's been animating the graphic elements and getting everything up to a beautiful 1080p @ 60fps (Flash version was 720p @ 20fps).  I've grown to appreciate the way that code ties together in Unity, but for 2D animations it's significantly clunkier for me than Flash was.

Below are a few screenshots of the games I've gotten to be playable* in the last few weeks, there are 23 game modes total that need to be recreated and I've gotten 16 pretty close to done so far. *Playable meaning that the code and animations are done, but no hole LED functionality for the actual machine yet... that shouldn't take too long, I just need to pull my scoring area out of the machine and hook it up to my laptop while I make sure all of the LEDBlinky animations are linked up correctly.  The endgame is to include the ramp, ball return, and possibly plexiglass "net" area in the LED animations as well but right now it's just the holes themselves.


Main menu, very happy with how it turned out and I just finished coding it so that I can add/remove games quickly and easily.  Before, I would be left with a handful of prototype/half-working games in the menu because adding/removing required adding a bunch of code.


My take on the dart game X01... still needs a bit of polish, but very happy with the way this is turning out.  You can select between 1/2 player and 310/510/710/910.  The surf music, waves, clouds, bg islands, and player animations really make this one come alive.


Flux capacitor, rain, and lightning effects are pretty cool on this game... one great aspect of Unity is the built-in particle generator as opposed to having to manually code them from scratch in Flash.


Basically both players start with 150 points and go back and forth trying to steal points until one player gets all 300.


Self explanatory, but the bubbles and changeable beer logos make this one fun to look at.


Blasting snot on other players is surprisingly satisfying.


Stallone is gonna sue somebody.  Again, Unity's particle generator makes the snow easy-peasy.

Overall I'm not sure about an ETA or frankly whether I will ever release it publicly, as I've incorporated quite a bit of personal flourishes/copyrighted music/images-that-are-pretty-close-to-actual-Skeeball-graphics that I wouldn't feel comfortable releasing.  This is truly a labor of love that I'm just not sure what I want to do with once it is complete.

I would definitely be open to sharing some of my assets, specifically the ones that are more traditionally "Skeeball" related if that could be helpful to get Skeeball running on things like the Pi.  Will hopefully have more build updates soon once I get the software to a place where it can replace the Flash version in the actual machine!

[netlohcs]

Its awesome that after all this time, you are still going at it! I think I said this originally, but reading your post was one of the biggest inspirations to making my own tables.  Speaking of.... my journey has continued also.  I should update my post soon.

[thatpurplestuff]

So if you've read any of the early pages of this thread, I've made some absolutely terrible rings along the way and struggled to come up with rings I was happy with.  I ended up using a solution of coiled vinyl baseboard which looks fine from a distance, but the overlapping look has always bugged me a bit and I always felt like I was missing something obvious in making the rings.

I've spent the last few months toying with an idea to make the rings more substantial and able to maintain their shape on their own... the original plan was to use 1 inner layer vinyl baseboard, a middle layer of rubber (I've always wanted some contrast on the edges of the rings), and then an outer layer of vinyl baseboard all held together with metal brackets and Chicago screws rather than rivets like I had done previously.

Skeeball ring sandwich


Sandwich ring next to coiled ring


Chicago style screws added


I honestly love this look and sorta settled on making all my rings using this method but decided to stare at it for a while before I went ahead and did all of them (this wasn't cheap, the rolls of rubber were $150 total before the vinyl and hardware was factored in).  I literally just plopped this ring on to my work desk just so I'd be forced to look at it a few times a day.  I'm planning a complete rebuild of the scoring area with hopefully brighter LEDs, and at some point I think I went insane and thought that LEDs INSIDE the rings themselves was a good idea.  I posted a question about "neon" LED strings on the main forum, and forum member lilshawn was kind enough to offer helpful feedback.  After a week of playing with the idea I scrapped it, mainly because the neon LEDs I could find had way too large of gaps where you could cut them so using them in rings would potentially have large gaps (plus I was nervous about the idea of solder points being whacked by Skeeballs).

Fast forward a month and I couldn't get the LED idea out of my head, so I did some digging and found some random online LED shop in China that sold the empty silicone "neon" LED diffuser and LEDs that have cut lines every inch rather than every 3".... this makes the concept much more feasible so I convinced the wife to let me drop another $200 on parts that may very well end up getting wasted on a terrible idea haha.

I decided to trim the inner rubber by the exact height of the silicone diffuser so I could just slip it in the top.  It seems to work great, and once I get this all dialed in the vinyl baseboard actually has adhesive on the back that I can peel the paper off of and make everything really attached nicely... between the adhesive and the brackets these things should be very sturdy.

Neon ring next to black rubber ring


Neon ring with LEDs installed and wired up


White


Red


Blue


Fired them up with LEDBlinky and I'll be damned if it doesn't look awesome.  This ring is still a pretty rough prototype, I'm going to adjust the spacing of the brackets to more closely match the original rubber one since there are some spacing issues that I want to fix as best I can.  Overall I'm ecstatic about the look of this, now I just need to start making the final rings and then get everything installed on the machine.  This could still be a complete disaster, as I have no idea what the longevity of these LED strips will be once they are on the receiving end of Skeeballs, but I'm optimistic since I did recess them just a bit and the vinyl/silicone diffuser offers sort of a double barrier for the LED strip.

Once I determine if these are a realistic option for Skeeball machines, I will detail the parts and process I went through to make them... it's deceptively harder than I thought it would be to get everything to fit nicely with each other but so far I'm thrilled.  I will mention that this is not for the faint of heart, as I'm at least $500 into this after RGB amplifiers, power supplies, rubber, vinyl, LEDs, silicone diffuser, metal braces, and the Chicago style screws are factored in.  I'll be absolutely gutted if this doesn't work haha

Will update as more rings get finished!

[thatpurplestuff]

Also, just wanted to thank arzoo for being so awesome.  My machine uses LEDBlinky and I reached out recently regarding some animation issues I had (I was hoping to be able to call separate animations for the rings/ramp/ball return and he went out of his way to add the functionality even though I'm a very edge-case scenario).  He's great and his software is fantastic!

[eds1275]

but the overlapping look has always bugged me a bit and I always felt like I was missing something obvious in making the rings.

If you are using 3 layers, which looks awesome I might add... why not stagger the seams, and use glue to avoid needing any hardware?

[thatpurplestuff]

but the overlapping look has always bugged me a bit and I always felt like I was missing something obvious in making the rings.

If you are using 3 layers, which looks awesome I might add... why not stagger the seams, and use glue to avoid needing any hardware?

Hey eds great to see you on here!  Last I read you had just beat cancer for the second time, I know you've had a lot of health setbacks but I hope you are doing well!

I actually tried staggering them a bit on a couple test rings, and the rubber was substantially more rigid than the vinyl so wherever the rubber seam was would create a little bump on the outer vinyl.  You could probably fix this by using something besides rubber in the middle (maybe even just the same white vinyl tripled up inside) but I haven't explored that option yet.

One thing that was important to me, at least until I try these out on the actual machine and see their durability, is that I'm able to take them apart easily so that I can replace the LEDs if necessary.  I've got no idea if these will be rock solid or a complete disaster haha.

I'm finished with both 100 rings and almost finished with the 50 and 40 rings, so I'm making slow and steady progress!  Once they are all done and I've mounted them (got some interesting ideas I want to try that I hope will hide the brackets nicely) I'll post updates of the rings all lit up and in action!

[eds1275]

Hey eds great to see you on here!  Last I read you had just beat cancer for the second time, I know you've had a lot of health setbacks but I hope you are doing well!

Hey thanks! My health is going down again after contracting the Long Covid (whether you believe it or not, I'm proof) It seems to be just crippling exhaustion for me, cognitively based... like I can still hike a mountain but if I think too hard I'm down for a day. Really frustrating. Also my doctors have great promises but are slow to get the ball rolling (just a skeeball joke for ya.) I have been working on some new projects, although due to real estate, not arcade related! J7ust grabbed a dinky bandsaw this morning to help me out making some ukuleles.

[rustymoose]

Didn't realize I could attach pictures to my post directly.  Heres a few.

@netlohcs that looks amazing!  Love the clean / modern look.  Did you cut each individual piece of polycarbonate or is there in an existing product in that shape?  What product did you use for the rubber top?  My son and I are using Python and Tkinter for ours as well.  Pretty easy to get into and chatgpt making learning faster too. 

[thatpurplestuff]

eds1275: ahh man that really sucks, from what I've read long covid is awful.  Hopefully you start getting back to normal soon!

rustymoose: netlohcs has a build thread of his awesome machine here -> https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,163879.msg1726955.html#msg1726955

Regarding my build, I've got all of the rings but the 10 ring cut, assembled, and ready for the LEDs to be placed in them.  Waiting on some parts in the mail before I start the final push towards putting together the final version of the scoring area!  The rings look a bit warpy at the tops, but that's because of the paper-backed adhesive that I haven't set permanently yet. Once I place the LEDs inside, I'll remove the paper and hopefully all of the adhesive from the inner and outer vinyl will hole everything together nice and snug.  I also plan on painting all of the Chicago screws white to make them blend in a bit more with the rings.

[rustymoose]

eds1275: ahh man that really sucks, from what I've read long covid is awful.  Hopefully you start getting back to normal soon!

rustymoose: netlohcs has a build thread of his awesome machine here -> https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,163879.msg1726955.html#msg1726955

Regarding my build, I've got all of the rings but the 10 ring cut, assembled, and ready for the LEDs to be placed in them.  Waiting on some parts in the mail before I start the final push towards putting together the final version of the scoring area!  The rings look a bit warpy at the tops, but that's because of the paper-backed adhesive that I haven't set permanently yet. Once I place the LEDs inside, I'll remove the paper and hopefully all of the adhesive from the inner and outer vinyl will hole everything together nice and snug.  I also plan on painting all of the Chicago screws white to make them blend in a bit more with the rings.

Rings look awesome, nice work!  Do you still plan on fastening with L-brackets? You and Uncle T inspired my build so thank you for sharing your journey!

[thatpurplestuff]

rustymoose- Yup, but I plan on attempting a different method of using the L brackets.  Basically the plan is to hide the brackets inside of the rings... going to route out enough rubber to slide a small L bracket up inside the bottom of the ring, then run a Chicago style screw through the ring to attach the bracket.  To attach the other side of the bracket to the wood, I'll route out just enough wood to make the bracket flush with the wood and then screw that in.  After that I have to carefully cut the fake wood vinyl flooring into pieces to fit around the rings, which will cover the brackets that are attached to the wood.

Effectively the only mounting hardware you will see is the Chicago style screws if everything goes correctly, and all of those will be painted white so they will be much less visible at a glance (basically all the metal hardware you see in the latest pic will be white).

Sorta hard to explain the way I'm mounting them and I'm not sure any of that made sense to anyone but me, but I plan on doing a test mount in the next few days and I will post results!