I swear I'm not dead! In fact, here's a video of my Skeeball software to show that I haven't been completely worthless the last couple months.
1) Yes, I am aware that my laptop has a blue line in the screen. I had a stuck pixel for years, but a few months ago it turned into a solid line. Awesome!
2) The software is officially (I think) named Free Skee.
3) All of the sound in the game is just kinda thrown in... planning on a complete overhaul once the graphics and gameplay are done.
4) Bowling and Old School modes still need aesthetic work... I loaded up Bowling just to show the gameplay but visually it still sucks, and the Big Lebowski sound in the intro needs to go.
I trimmed a lot of the dead wood out of the software... I had a few games added that simply weren't very fun in their present form (mainly because they are games that had to be modified or simply aren't that fun with only one player), so I figured I would cut them out until I decide how/if I want to integrate multiplayer into the machine. Honestly, it had too many game modes on the main menu and it seemed that half of them were never played. Also, I removed the "Combo" on/off option, since it was wreaking havoc with hi-scores. We would have people over playing different game modes and it was confusing to have them track whether or not the multiplier was on. Instead, the game modes themselves dictate whether or not multipliers are enabled. The basic "Free Skee" game is exactly like regular Skeeball except it tallies multipliers if you get the same ring 2, 3, or 4 times in a row. In order to see which ring you hit last, I have tickets that pop out from the side of the screen that keep track of your rolls. The other games have multipliers as well, with Flash Point's being indicated by the lights at the bottom and Bowling's being indicated by the number of neon pins lit on the bottom. Old School will have the traditional Skeeball scoring with no multiplier.
Performance-wise I had to remove some very sweet glow / glare effects that I had on the LED scoreboard... it simply made things crawl even though it made it look very cool. I also had a pretty sweet rolling scoreboard for ThreeTen, but again it made the game move like molasses. Build-wise I put the kabosh on the Woot lights for the machine... they are a bit cheap looking and not really the look I want anyway.
Now for the important part. Before I finalize the sides and throw paint on the machine, I have one last thing I want to add. I just purchased an LED-Wiz 32-port USB lighting controller and 10 RGB-Drive pushbutton lights to run along the sides of the machine. I am redoing the top of the sides of the ramp, and there are going to be 5 lights on each side that will hopefully be able to both interact with certain game modes as well as just race around changing colors and attracting people to play.
Randy from GroovyGameGear.com provides an ActiveX control in order to use the LED-Wiz with your own software, but I read somewhere that Actionscript doesn't allow you to access ActiveX controls. I really haven't done much research on this yet (literally searched for 10 minutes earlier tonight), but one option that I saw floated was to use Actionscript to communicate with JAVA and then JAVA to communicate with ActiveX. This sounds like a huge pain that I will undertake if I have to, but if anyone knows how to better integrate ActiveX with my Actionscript-based software I would be incredibly grateful.
To mgb, yeah I am able to pop under the hood fairly easily and things do need a readjustment every once in a while. Thanks again for all of the kind words and interest!