(Topic ID: 128778)

a Popeye P-roc Project

By uncivil_engineer

8 years ago


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  • 27 posts
  • 14 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 6 years ago by chad
  • Topic is favorited by 8 Pinsiders

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#1 8 years ago

This is not my first P-roc parade, but this one is far more ambitious than my last project: a remake of the 1979 game Flash. (you can read about hit here: http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?topic=1512.0 )

A bit of history first. Popeye Saves the Planet has the distinction of being one of the WORST of the wide body WPC machines. It came out in 1994, just after the hugely successful Star Trek: The Next Generation. The game is so bad, the distributors threatened to sue Bally/Midway if they tried to enforce their ‘minimum buy clause’ in the sales agreements. Worst of all, they guys at Bally/Midway knew they had a flop on their hands. It only sold about 4,700 units. Some people consider this machine to be the beginning of the end of Bally/Midway/Williams.

So why is the game so bad? We first off, the theme just sucks. A Popeye themed machine could be fun, but why on earth did they go with an eco-environmental theme? I just seemed that they started out on this machine completely on the wrong foot.

Then to add insult to injury, the playfield is IMO overcrowded. I haven’t gotten my machine up and running yet, but just from looking at it, there appears to be so many obstructed shots it is almost unplayable. The upper playfield, while a nice idea, is just too big. On the left side of the playfield is a large blue shoot that is used to select ‘animals’, and on the right side is a huge rotating skill shot drum. Both of these (especially the animal shoot) tend to obscure the playfield. The end result is a wide body pinball machine that plays like a much smaller machine.

My goal in this project is to make a Popeye themed machine that is much more playable through a re-write of the rules, some re-theming, and possibly some changes to the playfield. I have some P-roc code writing experience, but this will put me back on the programming learning curves because now I have a lot more devices to deal with and a DMD to work with.

Right now I am in the ‘idea’ stage while I go through the machine to get it playable again. I am seriously considering getting rid of the Animal shoot on the left side of the playfield, but there is a ball popper that feeds into it that needs to be considered.

The candidate machine was purchased here on the board about a week ago, and I am going through the machine to get it all up a running again on the stock WPC boards so I can make some honest evaluation as to how I can improve the machine.

The machine came to me in ‘project’ condition. It had a bad IC in the chip matrix that kept the game from booting, a missing ball shooter, and lots of rotten rubber. The machine came out of the Las Vegas area, and it looks like the desert heat has indeed done a job on the rubber inside of this machine.

On Monday night I was able to get the machine to boot for the first time buy ‘borrowing’ the ULN2803 out of my P-roc. Lucky for me, the P-roc uses nearly the same setup for it’s switch matrix that the WPC MPU board did. In the excitement of getting the machine to boot, I put some credits on it, and tried to start a game. That is when I made the discovery of the missing ball shooter coil. At least the shooter brackets are still there. I ran through the rest of the coils self tests, and confirmed the other coils all worked. The flippers were not working too well either, but a quick cleaning of the flipper opto board got them going again.

Last night I was able to spend some quality time with playfield. I guess there is one advantage to being a sucky game, it had so few plays on it the playfield looks to be almost perfect under a thin layer of grime. I think this machine will clean up nicely.

So now I just am waiting for my order form marco specialties so I can finish rebuilding my ball shooter, and start doing 'research'.

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#11 8 years ago

Wow, there are a lot of good suggestions here. I am still waiting on my shooter coil, after that I can't wait to start playing it.

#13 8 years ago

What is the latest version of Popeye? Mine gives me LA-2.

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#17 8 years ago

Well I have the flippers on order.

I did get my shooter coil installed tonight, and was able to play a few games. Even with tired flippers, the game is fast.

1 week later
#20 8 years ago

Ok, an update of sorts....

I have finished shopping out the game, and I today I replaced the lower lightening flippers with standard sized flippers, and moved them to the upper playfield. I also got a Version 5 chipset.

Replacing the flippers has a huge impact on game play. With the slightly longer standard flippers on the bottom, the loop shots are much easier, and completing the animal stampede is almost too easy. I may have to dial my difficulty level form easy to medium to make it a little more challenging.

With the lightening flippers on the upper playfield, finding sweet pea has gone from something you dream about to something that is almost achievable. I the ball doesn't drain nearly as easily, and now more often than not get lost by flying out of the upper playfield. That is one thing I can address with the P-roc, as I think I will be able to dial back the pulse strength of the flippers. I almost with the flippers were about 1/4" shorter, as it would give the ball a little more room to drain down the middle.

Version 5 of the standard software feels a little more finished that the version 2 chip I took out. One of the first things I noticed is that popeye has a lot more one-liners in it. Other than that, the game play doesn't appear to have changed much.

Having played the game for about a week now, I can say the animal ramp does not obscure the playfield as badly as my first impression lead me to believe it would. The skill shot wheel is much worse. I may have to try to figure out how to get that off the playfield. This presents a real design challenge because there are three hamster trails that go in and a round it. Plus the fact that it is the skill shot. More thinking needs to go into this problem.

On the P-roc front, I have put together a machine YAML file, and I am may remove the CPU board tonight and try to get PinMame running. Small steps...

1 week later
#21 8 years ago

Progress!!

There are several programming frameworks that can be used with the P-roc. For this project I will be using PyProcGameHD and SkeletonGame. The PyProcHD is setup to allow for the replacement of the DMD display with a regular lcd monitor, and supports such things as image layering, and playback of mp4 files. SkeletonGame is a basic game frame work that takes handles a lot of the basic game functions, like trough management, ball management, and score keeping in the background. This allows the programmer to concentrate on creating game modes.

When you are doing a P-roc project, one of the first things you do is set up your development environment. There are some neat tools that the P-roc community have developed that allows the programmer to test their code without having to hook the actual P-roc up to the machine. SkeletonGames has built into it an OSC server that starts up when you launch your code. This allows you to use an OSC client software to do such things as send switch inputs, and read the lights the game code is calling for.

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The client software is a neat little python based OSC server that one of the guys over at pinballcontrllers.com cooked up that allows you to overlay the lights and switches on a game image. This allows you to do alot of your development without taking your game out of commission.

On the hardware front, my LCD monitor came in! The monitor is a LP156WF1 15.6" laptop LCD screen I picked up off ebay. I also got a kinda rough lower backglass section that I plan on mounting the monitor.
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The LCD monitor will just fit between the posts that were used to mount the original DMD display.
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Now all I need to do is get a controller for my LCD monitor so I can hook it up to my computer. It will be run as a second monitor.

1 week later
#24 8 years ago

I got some more of the hardware up and running tonight.

To run my monitor, I purchased a M.NT68676.2A LCD Controller Board Kit off ebay. The kit came today, along with a 12v laptop power supply for the monitor.

It took me longer to find my mini-port adapter than it did to setup my new monitor. The screen hooks into the video card of the computer and is seen like a second monitor. All you have to do is adjust the configuration settings in your config.yaml file to make the display window appear in the second monitor, and set the flag to false that control the window outline. The result is a good looking LCD laptop monitor that will become my Popeye's main display.

Here it is in action, along with my development environment:
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Here is a sample of the screen resolution. Right now I have it set pretty low, mainly because I only have a VGA mini-port adapter. A visit from the post man may fix that in the next day or two.
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This is my current skill shot splash screen:
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So now I need to get it mounted up into my lower backglass...

2 years later
#26 6 years ago

No, I'm afraid not. Like a lot of projects, life caught up to me, and the game got sold.

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