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Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

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Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#41

Post by mulmen »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #35
mulmen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about the DumbAss boards: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/dumbass-test-and-rep... . Are those the same as Pinbal Basement?

I own two System 11 pins. What’s the advantage of replacing the board if the current one works? Is it different roles in the software?

No benefit to replacing working Williams boards. The benefit is if you have a bad board and can't find replacements. The DumbAss boards are electronically identical to Williams boards so you can install them in any combination in a System 11 pin without any other modification. They're simply modern replacement parts.

The software is whatever you flash on to the ROM and could be modified on a Williams or DumbAss board equally.

Also what System 11 machines do you have? I have a High Speed (with Williams boards).

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#42

Post by shanebellone »

mulmen wrote: post #38
shanebellone wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, do you mean different physical machines of the same type?

Yes. The rules are the same (although there are often many versions of the rules, and settings within each version) but the physical machine is always going to vary, both physically in construction and in setup. The tilt sensitivity, type of rubber used, condition of parts, level of the playfield, type of feet, tightness of legs, flooring, strength of the coils, angle of the flippers, size of the flippers, cleanlines…

That's fascinating. Thanks for the context.

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#43

Post by koz1000 »

shanebellone wrote: post #23

This is very cool. I wonder if niche arcades could make a comeback with something like this. Imagine global competitions between clubs competing for rank, recognition, and reward.

Stern tried this a long time ago to compete with Golden Tee Golf tournaments, since those games were paying people cash and killing pinball in street locations like bars.

The problem was stopping nefarious players from taking the glass off and rigging the score. It's an impossible thing to prevent.

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#44

Post by phanimahesh »

Interesting. Reminds me of something I built a few years ago.

To demonstrate low latency for a proxy we built, we decided to do a small publicity stunt at a local conference. We found an old pinball machine, managed to reverse engineer and findbfrom patchwork docs and some experimentation that we could send some commands to control flillers over a serial port.

Then we built a web application that would receive commands over http, and forward them appropriately. Ran this on a laptop connected to the pinball machine. Then we setup our proxy on a raspberry pi, setup some mobiles to access the webapp via the proxy, and had a fun little demo.

Users can tap left and right halves of screen on mobile web page to send requests, and could see the pinball flippers move. Our stunt was that see, it's pretty fast and low latency even with some simulated background load on the system.

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#45

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

mulmen wrote: post #41
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own two System 11 pins. What’s the advantage of replacing the board if the current one works? Is it different roles in the software?

No benefit to replacing working Williams boards. The benefit is if you have a bad board and can't find replacements. The DumbAss boards are electronically identical to Williams boards so you can install them in any combination in a System 11 pin without any other modification. They're simply modern replacement parts. The software is whatever you flash on to the ROM and could be modified on a Williams or DumbAss board…

I have a Terminator 2 - a lot of similarities to High Speed because both were designed by Steve Richie and i think T2 came right after High Speed for him (could be wrong about that last bit). Also have a Cyclone. Both have lots of mods and addons. I used to be really into the hobby but not so much anymore.

The t2 back glass is signed by Steve Richie when I met him at Texas Pinball Fest in 2019.

There’s a podcast interview with Richie somewhere that he talks about designing HighSpeed. As I recall, he had a Porsche in the 80s. He was speeding home one night - very fast like 120 mph or something crazy. He was pulled over by a cop. Or maybe he dodged the cop. I don’t remember the rest of the story but it was interesting, and it became the inspiration for your pin.

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#46

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

shanebellone wrote: post #42
mulmen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The rules are the same (although there are often many versions of the rules, and settings within each version) but the physical machine is always going to vary, both physically in construction and in setup. The tilt sensitivity, type of rubber used, condition of parts, level of the playfield, type of feet, tightness of legs, flooring, strength of the coils, angle of the flippers, size of the flippers, cleanlines…

That's fascinating. Thanks for the context.

Wear and tear can greatly affect game play. Sometimes for the better!

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#47

Post by stjrweyer »

https://github.com/BallySternOS/BallySternOS

ballysternos is a really neat arduino project that sits on the debug header of old bally and stern mpu boards. the arduino holds the 6800 in halt from the start and re-implements game code

i've seen at least two of these in the wild, one in a Bally Eight Ball running "Eight Ball Plus" code, and another in a Stern Meteor running "Meteor 2021". both add some neat super-features and game modes, the Meteor has an accompanying wav trigger board, speakers, and amp to add wav sound effects as well -- anyone who loves Meteor will appreciate (or hate) that it no longer screams your spinner value in a high pitched tones.

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#48

Post by pbj1968 »

tannercollin wrote: post #13

Amazing, we are currently doing something very similar at our makerspace on a 1987 Road Kings pinball machine. We first replaced the original RAM chip with a IDT 7132 SA100P dual-port RAM that sits on a breadboard: https://pic.t0.vc/WPUO.jpg The other port is accessed by an ATmega 1284 to the left of it. Its code responds to simple serial commands and can read and write to the RAM. An ESP32 talks to the ATmega over U…

Road Kings?!? :\

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#49

Post by mulmen »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #45
mulmen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No benefit to replacing working Williams boards. The benefit is if you have a bad board and can't find replacements. The DumbAss boards are electronically identical to Williams boards so you can install them in any combination in a System 11 pin without any other modification. They're simply modern replacement parts. The software is whatever you flash on to the ROM and could be modified on a Williams or DumbAss board…

I have a Terminator 2 - a lot of similarities to High Speed because both were designed by Steve Richie and i think T2 came right after High Speed for him (could be wrong about that last bit). Also have a Cyclone. Both have lots of mods and addons. I used to be really into the hobby but not so much anymore. The t2 back glass is signed by Steve Richie when I met him at Texas Pinball Fest in 2019. There’s a podcast inte…

Yes I have heard that story. I think he actually got a ticket for 146mph. That’s the speed on the radar on my backglass. I have a T3 as well, the first pin Ritchie made for Stern. T2 is a classic but I think T3 is underrated, many similarities. Much like High Speed vs Getaway.

I got into ownership during the pandemic, was the only way to get my fix. I’m up to five now!

Would love to meet Steve and his brother Mark who designed Fish Tales, which I also own. TPF seems to be the place for that.

Another bit of Steve Ritchie trivia is that he shared a cube with another Steve at Atari. This one was named Steve Jobs!

Re: Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet

#50

Post by __init »

MayeulC wrote: post #14
daveslash wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started off as an EE in college ~20 yrs ago before switching to CS. I did some circuit board design work (never fab) as part of my coursework, but haven't touched it since. I have some baseline familiarity. I think we used pSpice and Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements. I'd like to jump back into it for hobby reasons. Any recommendations on modern low-budget software-tooling?

> Cadence, which (at the time) still had a lot of Win 3.1 era MFC UI elements I'm not sure how it appeared on windows, but cadence is the kind of software with an extremely long history. I'm pretty sure even recent releases have code that date back to the 70s. As far as I know, it has always targeted UNIX, then X11, using raw XLIB for drawing? X11 forwarding still seems to be the preferred option for using it. Anyway…

X11 forwarding for Cadence's chip layout tooling is practically unusable nowadays! Sub-1 FPS, even on a reasonable 1 Gbps pipe with only 3-4 ms ping. I had to use NoMachine when I was doing that work -- proprietary tooling that does the "simpler" image/video streaming.
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