Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Virtual Pinball - A New Era in Experimentation

Well, my Virtual Pinball project now starts in earnest. Thanks to a local pin collector Al Warner, I have a bombed out EM pinball cabinet to start with. Apparently, the previous owner (not Al) sprayed WD-40 on the reels or somewhere, and it caught on fire because of the sparks. Notice the crater on the top right side of the playfield. The joker also used plexiglass for the playfield glass...

I also went out to Microcenter and bought the components for a smokin' (pun intended) desktop PC system to run the Visual Pinball, PinMAME, and Hyperpin applications. I was able to get the following components:
AMD Quad-core CPU running at stock 3.4GHz
Gigabyte Model GA-880GA-UD3H
4 GB of DDR3 (Patriot Memory)
500 GB Hard Drive
NVIDIA GTS450 with 1GB DDR5

Got about $40 of instant savings and about $90 of instant rebates. So the PC will come out to around $500. I was able to install Visual Pinball onto my system (thanks Mitch for technical and morale support). Had to tweak and optimize some settings, but I finally got it to run my favorite Southpark very nicely. Also ran Dirty Harry and a few others quite well. Now I need to install a secondary display for the active backglass. Here is a picture of my test bench. I have the Southpark running along with the backglass. Looks really awesome, plays great too. While surfing the VPinball websites, I found a user's guide for VP: VP User's Guide 2/27/2011 - Some of my tables like Southpark and Dirty Harry were running pretty good, but most of them were lagging and stuttering pretty badly like Strikes and Spares and some of the older tables. The system I put together has enough horsepower to run the software. Mitch came over so we could debug the software, since he had no trouble getting his tables to run on a slower system. After disabling the active backglass on Strikes and Spares, we were still getting poor performance. I had noticed in the Task Manager Performance tab that when Vpinball was running, it would peg only one of the 4 cores on my CPU. We disabled 3 of the 4 cores on my CPU using the BIOS settings, and that was the magic bullet that made the Vpinball run properly. Now the tables run with no lag or stutter. It was AWESOME!!! Now I can move on to fixing up the cabinet. 3/6/2011 - Got some work done on the cabinet this weekend. I was able to cut out the melted plexiglass using my newly purchased Rotozip. After taking off the playfield plexiglass, I was able to remove the playfield and sub-assembly as well as all the components, leaving a bare cabinet. Now to sand the cabinet. Using 60 grit and my trusty old Harbor Freight orbital sander, I put on my foul weather gear and went to work. It was windy and a frigid 55 degrees outside. I have to sand near the side rails by hand. Also, I used steel wool to polish up the stainless steel. The coin door gets the same treatment. Lots of elbow grease. I will probably be doing this when my insomnia hits in the middle of the night. The lockbar mechanism underneath was pretty nasty, had to sand away the rust then spray with grey primer. One of the legs was bent nicely, so I put on some Anvil Chorus on Youtube and started going at it. Was able to get the leg straightened out. Now just have to sand it down and prime, then paint. The cabinet is all primed now, it is nice and smooth. I got brave enough to void the warranty on my new LCDs, so here are the backbox LCDs taken appart with brackets made for mounting onto the 1/2" MDF.

Here is the 37" Vizio LCD TV decased and ready to attach to the bezel.



Took a crapload of work (and cordless drills) to fasion my routing jigs for my backbox bezel.


Here is the bezel with the routed openings

Here is the plunger mechanism. The default key for the plunger is ENTER. The switch will get wired to the keyboard encoder using the normally closed contacts because the plunger is activating the microswitch when it is in home position. When the plunger gets pulled back, it simulates holding the ENTER key down, untill it is released.




OK, I'm done...





Saturday, December 25, 2010

Atari Tempest Mini

Got my Tempest mini going before I left for Xmas vacation. I got the cabinet from a collector near Greenville SC. It is running a Dell M992 computer monitor at 1024x768 resolution. Looks really good... yeah I know, it's notta vector monitor, but it is a blast to play.





The CP overlay cleaned up nicely. I just sliced the tattered overlay at the bend where it meets the glass, then scrapped the adhesive off the metal. I will leave it like this for now until I feel like replacing the CPO entirely.





Friday, December 17, 2010

MONSTER MAME Control Panel

Got my Monster MAME control panel done. Now I can do some 2 player Smash TV / Total Carnage action!!!






Monday, November 22, 2010

Walk Through Video 11/21/2010

Got a new Canon Power Shot S95 so here is a mandatory walk through with all the games turned on. Enjoy.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Arturo's Arcade Lab - Home of SPACE PARANOIDS



We finally have a working prototype.



The trigger fires, and either top button centers the tank. 2-1/4" trackball on the left works like a mouse, I will probably reverse the Y-axis, which I think is more intuitive for aiming. Player 1 and 2 buttons, plus Continue and New Game buttons on the right.



Old Defender cabinet was a Mortal Kombat conversion when I got it. I will try a few other cabinets styles in the future. This one will be running at my TRON after-party in December.

UPDATE:
I was able to get the Space Paranoids game to reside on the hard drive so this machine no longer needs internet access to be playable.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Bubble Bobble in a Williams cabinet



I extracted this non-working Bubble Bobble from a daycare facility as part of a trade for a working game. Upon closer inspection, the cabinet seems to be an alternate style Robotron. I can see the outline of the Robotron sideart under the black latex paint.



It's been a while since this poor sod has been cleaned and vacuumed.



NASTY!!!



Monitor still works, and is in very decent shape. I cleaned the dirt off the screen and the image is clear and bright, very moderate burn-in.



Well I measured the voltages, and strangely, it measures +12Vdc where the supply is labeled +5Vdc. And I measured +5Vdc where it says +12Vdc. I get nothing on -5Vdc.

I swap out the power supply with a good one, connect the rails, and the thing comes to life. Board is good, monitor is good, working game!!!

So what now??? Well, I am planning to do a Robotron, or MultiWilliams out of the cabinet. It is rare to find an alternate Robotron cabinet, so this thing will not stay a Bubble Bobble for very long. The BB guts will go on Ebay or in a generic cabinet.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Ten - Hut!!!

I picked up this working Bally Midway Sarge less than 2 miles from my house. Don't think I ever played it in the arcade, but I do have a faint memory of the on-screen action. Takes a couple of games to get used to controlling the tank but once you do it is a blast to play.



The CP is pretty clean, and one side is mostly intact, the other side is torn up. Anyway, for the price, it was nice to get a rare game so close by.