Main > Main Forum
Build Your Own Pinball Possibilities...?
Mark70:
It's all about relays. You can do whatever you want with a bunch of relays, sensors and buttons.
My experience with this was like this:
In highshool our physics class had an egg race. The person who gets his egg from the roof of the gym to the gym floor the fastest with the egg in tact wins. I built the timing system.
I used:
-an old "laptop" about the size of a lage home theater amp. I think it was a 186.
-a PLC that my brother built in first year electronics in college which had a built in time routine.
-a solenoid
-some metal sensing proximity switches
It was no more complicated than any individual pinball curcuit. a keypress both started a timer and fired the soleniod (releasing the egg drop contest entry) The racer hit a piece of plywood hanging on rubber bands, moving it away from the proximity switches, sending a signal to the plc to stop the time and reporting it to the laptop.
The plc was 12v, the solnoid and prox switches were 110. It all interfaced very nicely and it used a few relays about the size of a cannon printer ink cartrage (first thing I saw).
I have no idea how vpinmame works, but it seems like it would be easier to make your own software. I'm wildly speculating on this now, but couldn't you figure out how visual pinball feeds input to vpinmame and tap the same inputs?
RayB:
I'd like to add that programming logic for a pin is probably a thousand times easier than any sort of video game. Think about it, all it is is inputs (ball touched this drop target "button", ball touched this hole "button"). That's all it is. A bunch of switches.
The coding would be alot of "if/thens", flags and maybe an array to help track what the last few inputs were. That's about it. No collision detection, no animation routines, no graphics drawing tricks, ... simple!
ChadTower:
Coding a SIMPLE pin is like that... most pins have game modes, sequences, logic and timing periods... when you consider that you are writing for optimum speed and raw hardware, I'd say it's mostly the same as a video game in difficulty.
allroy1975:
--- Quote from: ChadTower on March 10, 2006, 08:48:44 am ---Allroy... you want to build a complex, LCD capable, completely custom pin as your first design attempt and are complaining about cost of existing boards at the same time? Not only are those directly contradictory but they're unrealistic too.
My advice here is to start out with a reachable goal, that is, to retheme an existing pin and experience the process. Then go forward building something more elaborate. Don't go trying to build an atom bomb when you have never built a molotov cocktail.
--- End quote ---
Maybe I'm not being clear. what you're suggesting is go out..buy a working Pin. then destroy it. make it into a monster that I want.
Usually a good working pin is both hard to find and expensive. to spend that much money on something I'm going to destroy just seems stupid to me. I want to buy a trashed pin and resurrect it as my own design to SAVE money. if you buy a pin missing board or with trashed boards, that's perfect. like you said yourself, the programming is really the easiest part. It's just coming up with a trigger set and scoring rules.
I've worked on my own pins, I've built cabinets before. you're acting like building the table is the hardest part and I should start with.....building a table. Building the table IS the hardest part, and it's something that needs to be done either way.
or are you suggesting that I ...take my F14, get new artwork for it and bury the original stuff under that and pretend like I designed it? I don't think that's what we're talking about as: that's not what the guy with Futurama did.
Getting video to play in a windows VB app is NOT hard. that's the beauty of Windows. Writing a game that would do all the things I'm talking about would not be that hard to do for a programmer. I believe I mentioned that a friend of mine is a programmer and is VERY interested in working on this with me. He's also built a mame cab and done his fair share of fixing original pins.
I don't understand exactly why people do this stuff.....we ask a question: is this possible? and instead of giving constructive answers it seems like they just try to talk you out of it. what if when Oscar went to make his first spinner everyone had talked him out of it? I dunno...try to think more POSITIVE. this IS possible. So, how do we get there?
Allroy
ChadTower:
Actually, I did not suggest buying a working good pin. There are quite a few pins out there that are beyond salvaging that can be retooled. Repair the boards but the backglass is gone, the playfield is toast, and the cabinet is rotten. There are a lot of those out there that could be returned as a rethemed pin a lot easier and more likely than a decent pin.
You can try to tell me what a programmer can do, but I'm telling you, you're oversimplifying it. I am a senior software engineer with more than a decade of experience. A good programmer would not write such an app in Windows. It would very likely be (and WAS, if you remember) written under a minimal linux kernel. The only reasons someone would write something like that in Windows would be if they needed something already in Windows (such as PinMAME) or if they didn't know any other way.
I'm not telling you not to do it that way, but really, if you haven't ever attempted anything like this or even repaired a pin I suspect you don't understand the depth of what you are suggesting is so easy.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version