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Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

pinballmap.com

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Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#51

Post by busterarm »

fourteenfour wrote: post #42
busterarm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegas doesn't have a lot of arcades. Outside of the PHoF there's two in reasonable driving distance and neither of them focus on pinball machines. One is pretty much only rhythm games.

Yes, as a fan of arcades Vegas is disappointing. You'd think casinos might be interested in people who put money in machines without expecting a payout. The rows and rows of fancy slot machines with HD monitors do nothing for me.

As a fan of arcades, Vegas is better than most other cities.

The one rhythm place has all the Bemani stuff that I like and I can spend a day getting Drum Mania out of my system.

Then the other one has a 2 screen Darius, Bishi Bashi Champ and other goodies and then PHoF has me covered for the rest.

Maintaining old arcade machines is a pain in the ass and CRT (especially those that can sync down to 15Hz) days are numbered. 25 more years and you won't find any classic cabinets anywhere if I'm honest.

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#52

Post by bsimpson »

Pinball is a community sport.

Most cities have at least one pinball bar with a weekly tournament. The same sorts of people go every week, and there are always beginners joining. If you're in a new place and need some social exposure, look for a pinball bar.

I've met people at pinball tournaments who have found the confidence to move because they knew they'd meet new friends at the pinball tournament in wherever they're moving to.

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#53

Post by blockwriter »

It would be great if you could find the machine that is closest to 2 or more different locations, like if I want to challenge several friends across the country to post our high scores in a group message, and we needed to know what the shortest drive each of us would need to take in order to play the same make and model machine. Maybe it’s in the app, or I missed it.

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#54

Post by ryantgtg »

yawn wrote: post #3

I use https://pinside.com . It's been around for a long time and is an amazing resource for Pinball info.

Yeah, pinside is a great resource. Surprisingly, the pinside map was created four years after pinball map (source: wayback machine; disclosure: I'm a pinball map dev).

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#55

Post by weaksauce »

trbleclef wrote: post #48

What is the best way for an amateur to synthesize a similar site? I have used Google My Maps for a much smaller, manually updated map of air hockey tables.

it's completely opensource so you could host it yourself and retheme things.

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#56

Post by ryantgtg »

myself248 wrote: post #21

I keep seeing these little niche sites, like "map of pinball machines", which is for some reason not just a filter or data layer or set of metadata tags on some larger mapping infrastructure. Likewise, there's the "internet movie firearms database", and the "internet movie cars database", and several others, which are not just object classes in some larger internet movie attribute database. Why?

Is there an internet movie song database? I'd like to look up a song and see what movies and tv shows that song has been in. I thought I saw something like that many years ago... but wasn't exactly what I wanted.

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#57

Post by mustacheemperor »

blockwriter wrote: post #53

It would be great if you could find the machine that is closest to 2 or more different locations, like if I want to challenge several friends across the country to post our high scores in a group message, and we needed to know what the shortest drive each of us would need to take in order to play the same make and model machine. Maybe it’s in the app, or I missed it.

Worth noting the performance characterizations of an individual machine can depend on how it’s maintained and how the operator chooses to set it up - so this may not be a completely level playing field.

On the other hand, if you’ve figured out which Medieval Madness in your city you play best at, you can leverage that information to your advantage :)

Re: Pinball Map: Crowd-sourced worldwide map of public pinball machines

#59

Post by bdash »

KingFelix wrote: post #40
bdash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be fun to use this data to build a visualization of new games rolling out to locations across the world.

I am super curious about getting data from Stern since they have added Stern Insider. They record all your scores and give you little icons for achievements etc. I don't know what other data they store, but it would be pretty rad to do some stats on it and look at the time of day when balls get drained, and multiball run times against a population. So curious to see if any outside factors influence gameplay. Outside…

They collect a lot of information, but make very little of it available. What is available isn't exposed in a particularly friendly way. Some of the extra data they gathered makes it into the Year in Review stats they make available at the start of the year. https://social.bdash.net.nz/@mrowe/111779120066480793 shows an example of this.

I'd love to be able to see a moving average of my score on a particular game so I can see how I'm improving (or not) over time. Beyond that, I'm not sure what data would be useful other than as a curiosity.

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