Populating an APC board myself for use in a Space Shuttle. Love the build out so far. The pain was that I think I started half way through different APC versions, but after a few corrections to the BOM, I think I'll have my first board populated completely this week (just waiting on the appropriately sized tantalum cap and the 100n caps for the sound section and we're good to go).

I'm designing a mounting solution in CAD for the board now. Looking forward to digging into software. If you need any pinmame help or anything, let me know. I worked on the emulation stuff for Kingpin and it was a super fun project.

-- Jimmy

Ah yes, the turrible turrible DSP implementation. You *can* hack around it by using pulseaudio and running the application through pacmd so that the DSP device is emulated.

I can look into an up-to-date alsa solution if that's the biggest pain point.

Assuming you're running pinmame in linux and *cant* get audio, do the following:
1. sudo apt install pulseaudio
2. padsp <pinmame command>
NOTE: make sure to add "-dp oss -smp oss" to the command line options so that it tries to fall back to the DSP (which pulse audio is emulating)

Example:
pacmd ./xpinmamed.x11 -rp <rompath> <rom> -skip_disclaimer -skip_gameinfo -dp oss -smp oss
(you may or may not have to tweak/add other options as you're currently doing)

Having a blast working on this. Curious if anyone has run into this issue before I dive into the code: I am only able to get sound out of the 'SOUND.BIN' track. If I copy my MUSIC.BIN to SOUND.BIN on the SD card, the appropriate file plays, but it doesn't seem like the "music" channel is actually getting populated. I can see the file reads happening, but I never get any sound from the music track itself. The copying of music.bin -> sound.bin and hearing the contents verifies that the file is at least ok.

Going to dig in more, but wasn't sure if I was missing something glaring!

-- Jimmy

Thanks for the suggestion! It turns out I'm an idiot though, I forgot that Space Shuttle only has one channel

Why are you wrapping values in hex()? That'll return hex strings, which is probably not what you want. Write hex byte values instead.
Try ser.write(0), or 0x0 if you want to keep things hex formatted.

Otherwise your code looks good.

Correct. To get anything near a 2khz resolution on the gpio pins, you'd want to use RTLinux, a dedicated interrupt and direct memory writes to the GPIO regions

For Pinball 2000, I ended up doing the same thing. Though you can also program it bare metal on the pi using a bit of assembler and jump into C

I've done full pinball games using the RPi while also pushing out HD graphics. It can be done, but you have to optimize heavily. Generally full screen updates and long IO access times will kill you there.

I'm currently rewriting the core to Demolition Man 2000 to move it from a clunky PC under the cabinet to a raspberry pi.

Generally anything less than ~50 or so units the fab will likely hand solder anyway. However I've recently had to convert most of my board designs to use SMD components just because of the availability (and often cost).

While this board was moderately difficult to put together (just from the time spent), it was a rather therapeutic break from programming for a change

I checked my parts racks, and I do have 4 blank v2.4 PCBs if anyone could use one.

I'm just running on that paragraph as the main difference.

This is fantastic! You worked fast

Can't wait to see what you cook up!