A few folks know I'm working on this; might as well let some more people know.

It's a bit insane as the cost to go down this path is non-trivial, but I love the art and layout of Hook, and my son loves ...wait for it...Jake and the Neverland Pirates (did I mention he's four?). When he's older I'll sub the videos and audio for a regular Peter Pan theme, which is easily done with pyprocgame the way I have things set up.

There's a bunch that I haven't decided, and could use some input on.

1. Any thoughts on rules? I have to rewrite all of them
2. I'm certainly going with a VGA DMD; I'm tempted to try to fit a p2k head on it. Any thoughts on this?

Finally, a little preview.

image.jpg

It would be nice if there were a separate topic for custom machines.

Thanks! The show will be prominent in the game, but the core mechanics of the rules and modes will be influenced by the Hook playfield. I'm planning to make the game a bit more stop and go (at least brief pause, then go) than the game currently is now.

Frankly I haven't really say down and watched it either. I've heard a lot of episodes while coding for Buffy (and sent preview videos to Nelly that inadvertently have has Jake in the background as audio). My son has a lot of ideas about which toys should be where on the playfield. My requirement is lots of Corey Burton's amazing voice work as Hook; especially my two favorite quotes: "zig zagging is for losers!" And "run you scurvy princesses, run!"

The playfield layout on Hook is stellar; it could be a lot more than in currently is.

Yes; right now I'm strongly leaning toward a "regular" LCD backglass.

Okay, I mean like we are doing on Buffy: Large format LCD where the DMD typically sits, but a traditional backglass sitting above it.

The Hook is a strange duck. The head is extra tall (relative to Williams sizing), while the DMD panel is short (because of the 128x16 DMD). I was originally going to repurpose a different game's DMD/speaker panel to use as the LCD mount, but now I think I might go even taller and still have a normal sized backglass.

Those ultra wide panels are awesome. I spent forever looking at things like that too but pricing was brutal.

Good memory on Buffy. Indeed we were using 384x192; now we are using 480x240. Those are 2 (or 4:2) ratios as opposed to 4 of a standard DMD (128x32). So we use a normal widescreen LCD and further opened the DMD cut out on a standard speaker panel. Typically they are cut open ~13" wide and ~3ish" high. Ours is opened to 6.5" high. Nelly has pictures in the Buffy thread. There's some display "wasted" behind the wood, but this is the same as ColorDMD does, but we get to see more of the LCD.

We're behind on a Buffy play test video because he suffered a SSD failure and we've been rebuilding his image. My machine is in the middle of a shop job that's been in process for the last two months (coding is more productive for me than physically working on pins).

Wait: this is the Hook thread!

So, yeah, my thinking is, like Nelly is recommending, go as big as is feasible. I really like the idea of a display that goes where DMDs go but is edge to edge (no speakers in that location). It could give a nice "panoramic view of the water"-effect.

Thanks for the idea. I suppose it could be used like Road Show's "flying rocks".

Maybe in some mode if you complete a combo of right ramp, wind-coaster, then divert to the shooter lane for a skill shot that provides a two-ball multiball if you hit the skill shot. I haven't owned the game long enough to know how easy that is or isn't.

There are like six or seven specific display options that I added to the hdDMD fork of pyprocgame: width, height, fullscreen, x-offset, y-offset, dot-filter emulation, and scale. The screenshot shows 480x240 with a scale of 2. Rosh added a fps option. There are projects in the works by others that haven't been publicly announced that are running at higher resolutions. Rosh's mp4 real-time video decoder works well, too, to save space for video. If you want to do some fancy things with your display but you still love pyprocgame, this is where it's at:

https://github.com/mjocean/FullColor-hdDMD-pyprocgame

Eventually I'll share game code but not dots and audio. I don't want to get sued by "the mouse". It's not the cheapest proposition in the world to do this to your machine ($700 or so for the P-ROC, Snux's awesome s11 board, LCD, and some mini PC), but those of us who love Hook know how much more this machine could be. .

Thanks!

Looks good.

Did you get it working with Unit3D? I can't tell what simulator that is but the two display windows makes me think so.

The latest updates to the VP-Proc bridge from me support System 11/DE with only one line of code change in the vpt. I've brought it a long way from the "recode 75% of the games vbscript" state it was in over the summer.

Sadly almost no progress on hook as we are working furiously to get Buffy ready for Expo.

Gotta say, I've never encountered this, ever. It has to be from the bridge but I can't imagine why that would ever happen...

Good job tracking that down! Super helpful. I've never seen it.

This project, not /exactly/. Buffy made it to Expo and it had all my coding attention. Believe it or not a bunch of what I've written for Buffy will be reused here and, less than a week before expo Nelly and I agreed that we didn't want to deal with the limitations of the ACRelay anymore so he rewired the flasher side to use the extra 8 drivers on the Sys11-P-ROC driver board and I changed the code so that it no longer is an issue on buffy. I intend to do the same for Hook as well, since I'm using the same board for this, too (and the DE machines have a LeftRight relay that's identical to the acRelay).

Hook will get some attention from me very soon, so watch this space

Well, there was a new episode of Jake on this week. Pirate Pinball. My jaw was on the floor the whole time.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3347264/

Sorry. I've been working with on an intermediate layer on top of PyProcGame called SkeletonGame. It should make developing games on P-ROC much faster and I'm going to use it to develop Hook 2.0. I'll likely open source the game code but not the audio/video assets because I don't want a C&D.

SkeletonGame is being beta tested and put through it's paces by a few notable pinsiders (Curbfeeler is working with it for Pinbot 2.0 and Rosh is helping with it because, well, that's how he rolls). I'm going to get it out there for wide release sooner than later

I have to admit that I really like Hook, too. It's a fun game to play. The layout is really fun, and to me very reminiscent of a modified version of Cyclone with a hint of Hurricane.

It's hard to admit when you have too many irons in the fire, but it's true:
I have abandoned this project.

Sorry.

I sold my Hook a few weeks back. There were a few factors that led to this, but chief amongst them was that my son had outgrown and lost interest in the Jake and the neverland pirates show. It has been replaced with a Monopoly, a theme that I hope will have more staying power.

If anyone is interested in preceding with a project on Hook, PM me. Anyone who wants it, is welcome to the config files I genersted for Hook to run under PyProcGameHD/SkeletonGame.

At least working on this helped push both PyProcGameHD and SkeletonGame forward.

Back to coding Buffy for Expo...