That would be awesome... I guess I would suggest starting with a project machine. You can get some machines for around 300-500. Work on learning the in's and out's first hand. That way, if you decide it's more than you'd like to take on you can sell it. I bet it'd be tough to build with no pin experience.

Building an entire pinball machine from a blank piece of paper is an enormous project, you might want to take an existing machine and modify the playfield, I'm assuming that's what you intend to do, buy a 300-400 dollar machine and build your playfield out of a slab of 3/4 inch plywood, drill and mount everything, its actually going to take you hundreds of hours, but I am not going to discourage you from your dream, do it, but please, for gosh sakes, buy two or three pinball machines and dissect them and study them before you undertake this. MPU issues are another can of worms for a custom machine.

Its kind of like saying you want to do some serious bondage and leather games with a chick when you haven't even been to first base.

Now, let me stop saying mean things to the newbie and think about this one, because I have thought about this one myself, actually.
You could use a 199 dollar Ultimate MPU and pick one of the factory settings for the hundred or so machines stored on it that was the closest thing to the playfield of the virtual pin you like, namely the same number of pop bumpers, drop targets and slingshots, then wire the whole thing up.

would still take you hundreds of hours...
but other than a custom MPU, I don't see any way to do it without starting your own custom pinball machine company, which might be kinda cool.

Which brings me to another point.
If you are gonna go to this much trouble, why not design the entire playfield, you can using Visual Pinball, place the slingshots and drops and flippers wherever you want, create a table that plays well in the virtual world that's not too complex, then build the real thing, totally worth doing, because you designed every bit of it. And why not, if you are going to go to the trouble why not make it one hundred percent your design and build.

Welcome, new friend, I want to see you build a machine.

I am doing the same and have several reference machines to look at while building. Are you using the p- roc like I am? Here's the info on that in case you don't know. I'm really looking forward to programming this bad boy.

http://www.pinballcontrollers.com

That's interesting. Though starting from scratch means buying ribbon cables, not knowing how each pin interacts with what component on the playfield (could be way more confusing than picking a single pin).

Don't bother with visual pinball, use future pinball. It's a true 3d envoirnment, and doesn't require all the plugins (fonts, roms) that visual pinball does.

Which wood? Plywood? MDF? At least use something relatively smooth (preferrably baltic birch, which is what I believe is what playfields are made of). I've tried MDF, and it's pretty crumbly and not very stiff (made up of wood dust and glue).

If your going to really do this, I recommend starting out slow (DO NOT GO DIRECTLY TO WHITEWOOD). Start out with something that's easily changeable (foam board), and mockup parts to it (it's much trickier to get a clean and good layout that you realize). Only thing you need are working flippers so you can test your shots. Then when you have something you like, you can move to a whitewood. I highly reccomend looking at some of the work that ben heck has done (on his two existing pins, LOST and bill paxton), and watch his current lab videos of his zombieland progress with john popadiuk:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/benheck-shop

I believe pop bumpers are always controlled with switches directly. Flippers became digital 1992 on addam's family, so they are controlled by the CPU. Voltage also varies by year, I think they are currently 50V but they used to be lower.

Unfortunately, Future Pinball is a dead platform. The developer recently castrated some of the best options, made the old version unplayable, and hasn't been updating it. Visual Pinball isn't nearly as pretty, but it's an open-source project that isn't going away so easily and should be updated into the future.

I am also starting to build my own tables using VP and starting to code my own DMD as well. Let me know how the project goes. Can't wait to see it.

Cheers,
Nick

Visual Pinball is the way to go, the physics are good in my eyes, and I am working on my own tables with it as well. It can be frustrating, but really, its all we got. Before I build a real table I will perfect the ones I am working on, thats my plan, but please don't think i was trying to discourage you, the future of pinball depends on people like you -so definitely do it.

Most of the 'recent' (late 80's, 90's+) machines using 50V for coils. If you actually measure the voltage, you'll usually measure 70V on the 50V rail. I'm using a 70V power supply for my custom machine, and most of my customers are as well.

If you're going to scavenge a power/driver setup from an old machine, that will define what voltage to use. For instance, if you use a donor WPC machine, you'll likely want to use the WPC transformer and power/driver board. Subsequently, your coil voltages will be 50V (70V). The PDB driver boards that I designed and sell can take any DC voltage from 5V-90V; so you can decide what works best for you. If you want powerful flippers, you'll probably want to use at least 50V. If you're going for an older style machine with less powerful flippers, 30-40V might suffice.

My second question is on switching. The popbumpers and slingshots both have switches. Can these switches be used to directly operate the coil or are they solely for scoring and to tell the electronics to fire a transistor? If so, is there a standard "on time" to drive the coils?

Most fairly recent machines (80+?) wire the pop/sling switches to the CPU and let software decide when to pulse the associated coils. Besides giving software control of the coils (for test modes and such), it's nice to have software receive the switch events for scoring, etc. It's also nice to be able to disable the coils after tilts, and possibly at other times during a game.

With our P-ROC board, I'd recommend wiring all switches to the P-ROC and deciding in software when to activate the coils. This applies to the flippers too, where it's nice to disable them at various times (ie. high score entry).

My last question is on general DIY pinball. Is there a community location for DIY? There seems to be very little out there but, considering the complexity, it's no surprise. My machine will be a clone of the 3D Space Cadet Pinball game which use to come on Windows computers. Has anyone ever seen this done?
Thanks

You're always welcome to drop by our forums (http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum). Even if you aren't going to use our boards (P-ROC and PDBs), our users are always interested in hearing about new projects and happy to help out when possible.

Good luck!
- Gerry
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com

damn you are industrious

Almost all Pinball powerboards/rectifier boards use smoothing caps....Not sure how you've missed that in your research.

On modern games, 50V coils are only used on flippers, slings, VUKs...Most other solenoids that are used for diverters, ramps, target resets, etc. are low voltage....23V usually. And for the flippers, high voltage/low voltage combos are used so that the holding power is significantly reduced.

At 50V, a 200 ohm coil is only pulling .25amps. And with the ball traveling, rarely is more than a couple of coils on at a given time. Again, not sure why you think you're going to be drawing 10A in a short cycle. All coil actions are designed to be short cycle. Even when raising a ramp for example, the coil fires to lock the ramp up mechanically, but it doesn't stay energized. A separate coil then releases the lock and the ramp falls.

I have seen coils wired both ways depending on era and manufacturer. Black Hole for example has many coils that respond directly to a switch. The downside is that if a switch gets stuck, the coil stays on and overheats unless you add a fuse to the circuit. The flippers also get voltage directly from the transformer, which is smoothed out by large caps on the flipper assy's. DMD era games on the other hand are mostly CPU controlled. 50-60v seems to be the norm for most solid state era flipper coils.
I wish you luck on this ambitious project. I have been building a Ghostbusters game from a worn out Flash Gordon machine for nearly a year now. It's amazing how much work is involved and how many different skills/talents and other resources (ei 'favors from friends') are needed. Electronics are only a small part of what goes into it.

How to install Visual Pinball: http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?automodule=downloads&req=idx&cmd=viewdetail&f_id=2990

Someone made Space Cadet in Future Pinball: http://www.gopinball.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1646

"Like I said, my research turns up next to nothing as far as building a machine from scratch. Plenty of repair information which has what I needed deeply hidden. "

Reverse engineering works well with both flying saucers and pinball machines!

Nice ambitious project,stick around Pinside and keep us abreast of the project,no matter how long it takes.

Just one more..

takeone.jpg

I really love UV lit ball idea, I would go with the TZ style ceramic ball from Bling Pinballs.
ebay.com link: Twilight Zone ceramic Powerball Pinball Power Ball

Honestly, you have to start out slow. I think your jumping the gun. I would do the following steps:
1. Figure out how the hell your going to control everything. Scoring is the hardest part (unless you don't care and just want to recreate the table at this point). If you JUST want the latter, then at the very least I would get a transformer, and wire up the components laid out on a table (pop bumpers, flipper assembly, rollover switches for lights), and just test it out first
2. Once you have the electronics figured out, then you can start lying out a playfield. Again keep in mind, ball paths are very tricky. Having ramps off by even 1/16" of an inch, or tilted at a bad angle can affect gameplay (like bad ball drain)
3. Once you have everything figured out, then you have to assemble it (which means marking up the wood, marking up mounting points, etc).
4. If you get a "whitewood" version working, then you can figure out how you want to do artwork

Now this is JUST the playfield. For the cabinet, I would try to see if you can source an existing one (perhaps one that doesn't work, or was gutted for parts). I see a space jam cabinet on craigslist by me all the time for $90.

playfield starts off at 11/16" thick, this is sanded once inerts are installed to about 1/2" thick.

Coils are in 2 flavours, low power (ones that stay on for a short while or are directly driven (most of them) 28v) high power (flippers) 50V. They (momentary) are fired for 28ms.

Some coils may be driven directly by switches (slings) but it's not desirable as you can't add score off them. Other way is to use a fliptronics board that fires the coil and then tells the MPU that it's done it. Another way is to directly control it via the controller.

Looks kick ass so far!

Keep up the good work and make sure to keep all us nerds over here updated!

I see you work in your socks as well. Looks great, sounds awesome. Keep us updated.

A very ambitious and great project keep us posted this is awesome!

Ha! I totally had the same idea for a homemade pinball about 3 weeks ago on my blog:
http://homebrewpinball.blogspot.com/2012/01/laundry-list-started.html

I'm quite impressed, very, very cool.

Pat Lawlor said it best:

"The hard part is building it and making it fun. People come up to me all the time at Pinball Expo and tell me they have a great idea for a pinball machine. And they are probably right. It is a good idea. But the hard part is building it. There's a great Larry DeMar quote about this. You are looking at a whitewood with no rules. Larry liked to say, "There's one great game in there, but ninety-nine bad ones."

Good work there! I know how hard it is having been building Forbidden Planet for the past few years. There was over a year of CAD work before we even got to make anything! Wiring and operating system underway at the moment...

Ok, the fact that you've started to make your own LED array impresses me, and shows you're pretty serious about this. What are you using to drive the display?

You lost me after "The display is controlled by..."

Impressive.

VERY impressive.

Me too! HAHAHAHA!

This is something that really interests me as well. I'm nowhere near as electronically proficient as GTech13 seems to be, but I'm pretty strong on the overall creative design and mechanical stuff. I've been toying with the idea of designing a whitewood based on a custom theme and wondered where to get good CAD files of standard Williams components like flipper assemblies, pop-bumpers etc...

Anyone have these?

Arduino, just like ben heck, nice!

For those not in the know, this is a fancy term for using less wire to run multiple rows of lights by pulsing it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexer

So the question is, how do you actually program what it displays (beyond basic text)? Also where is all that data stored, certainly not in the chip?

What software you planning on using? (I use solidworks 2010). This is one of my goals as well, I wouldn't mind sharing the work of modeling up some components.

This is astounding to me.
I'm really blown away and hope you didn't mind any of my earlier comments, I apologize.
Very few are doing what you are doing, and we can only say, wow.
Trailblazer. will be fun to watch this happen.

Awesome thread, excited to watch this unfold. great job.

Wow glad you are still pursuing this and making progress. Keep it up, and keep us updated.

Fascinating project - I'll be watching your progress. Thanks for sharing with us.

I don't currently have Solidworks, just basic AutoCAD, but pretty easy to draft up any 2D or 3D models with that as well. Not as forgiving as Solidworks though. For visualization, we just use 3DstudioMAX. A lot of the work I do is architectural in nature so these two pieces of software are more suited to that. Either way, I'd be happy to work on some CAD blocks.

If you watch TILT the pinball 2000 documentary, there's a great scene where George Gomez is drafting up a 2D plan of a PF and he just plops a bunch of these ready-made Williams parts in place. That would be sweet to find.

cool vid..very informative and nerdy..just the way i like it

We need a update with some pictures!!!

Awesome Gtech13, keep up the hard work and more updates please.....

You may want to check out Pin George in Germany:

http://www.specialpinball.com/

His work is amazing, and he has been working on recreating Wizard Blocks, which was never produced. He may be interested in your work, and the two of you may benefit each other.

I'm surprised you made it as far as you have, in that many have ideas of doing something like this, but quickly realise how difficult it will be. The display construction... - the fact that you are willing to build that from the ground up is amazing!