Looking For Some Developers To Write a Pinball 2000 Emulator

[Pinball Wizard]

Well, I'm not 100% sure this is the right spot, but it is a project...

I am apart of a development team forming to write an open-source Pinball 2000 emulator. Pinball 2000 was a pinball system that combined a commercial PC and a arcade monitor with a regular pinball machine to create a holographic effect on top of the machine.

Everything in the game was pretty reliable other than the PC itself. The computer was low end and out of date at the time of release. It was a Cyrix Media GX CPU based computer and dependent specifically on the CX5520 bridge. The software depends on the integrated graphics in the Media GX CPU to operate.

The game code was not the usual i386 based game. It used what was called the PRISM card. It was a proprietary piece of hardware that held the game code, a battery to hold audits, and a few other minor things. The PRISM card was read as a video card to the PC, giving the software a very low-level access to the computer to take over. The ROMS on the card held the entire boot process for the game. The system the game was built on top of was XINA, a branch of XINU.

All control from the PC goes to a driver board that is in the cabinet through a parallel port. There has already been code written prior to now to control the power driver board from a linux PC. I have the link I can PM to anyone interested, but I can't post it because of my low post count.

The current plan is to write a emulator that can run on linux. The first part of the project would most likely be to get the CX5520 bridge emulated. Then the PRISM card would have to handled, but several subsystems can be branched off of that. The first system would be to handle getting the actual game code running. Beyond that, the sound controller is a custom chip known as DCS2. This hardware will have to be emulated, but is the same chip in the Midway Zues hardware that is already emulated in MAME. Lastly, the PRISM card handles the bookkeeping, audits, settings, etc and that will need to be handled. After we can get the PRISM card emulated and running, the final step will be to get the communication between the emulator and the parallel port.

Video display originally was at a CGA size, but would need to be scaled up to fit on modern day display. My understanding is that the graphics are already of at least VGA quality, but scaled down on the original hardware.


Anyone interested in the project?

[spoot]

Interesting, I assume this is for resurrecting Pin2000's after their boards blow?   C/C++ via gcc then?   

[Pinball Wizard]

Yeah. The PRISM cards were proprietary and more and more are dying, the motherboard in it was very specific, and they had bad cap problems that have killed a lot of these already, and the CPUs are known to overheat and die because the fan on the heatsink was also cheap.

[ChadTower]

This product already exists.

Google NuCore.

[Pinball Wizard]

NuCore is no longer available for sale. Our team is looking to replicate the same concept, but without the need for a USB dongle.

[ChadTower]

Huh.  I did not know this but just found the announcement on RGP.  There was no followup commentary which is really weird.  Wtf happened?  NuCore is a great product and, as you said, important to the future of Pin2k cabs.

[Pinball Wizard]

I personally know Chuck Hess, one of the guys involved, and he asked me not to share details of what happened. I will however, say this: NuCore will one day make a comeback. On the other side, I still believe it would be beneficial to push forward with this project.

[macattack]

very interested in the progress of this project.

I would love to see a replacement created for these systems. I already manufacturer a clone p2k cabinet for the VP world and would love to cnc some playfields to build an all out replica or to support new games using the p2k style of system.

[spoot]

I hope you get some traction with this project.  Would be sad to see all the pin2k's die over time.

[Compy]

Interesting idea.

[hemtoni]

News?

[ehaase]

Guys,

there is a preliminary driver in MAME for that and I'd like to join efforts to create a Pin2K emulator there.
I know it may be a slow platform for that but Area51: Site4 works somewhat (MediaGX) and so does the
sound in Cruis'n Exotica (DCS2 ROM-based).
So while there are a few challenges (PC Emulation slow, virtual keyboard not hooked up to virtual PC, DCS2
not sitting on PCI yet, hardware hookup to parallel port to be done in user space outside MAME) I would still
think this is the platform where one should start.

I know about the NuCore product and its QEMU (Open source license PC virtual machine) core and it's nice to
know that it can be done at least - other than that, the source code that's promised on their website at 35USD
never was publicly available, it's probably to fool the Open Source community around.
(feel free to send me a copy to convince me I am wrong here)

So- it's time for a rewrite - and this time hopefully including a proper DCS2 emulation not the binary blob replay
routines for ancient Linux that come with NuCore.  Yes I would like to help.