Greenfield, MA
My F-14 now feels so...unrealized...
(Topic ID: 91457)
Linked Games
F-14 Tomcat
Williams, 1987
Topic Gallery
Quoted from Snux:Decided to take the plunge and fit these RGB bulbs into the GI. It originally took me a few hours to fit and wire up all those new sockets when I had the new playfield. Now it's taken me a couple more hours to get them all back out again, lifting staples and pulling sockets with the playfield in the cab is such fun.
Once they were out, I tidied up the now unused GI wiring and fitted these new ones. Had to cut the chain a few times and fit in some longer sections of cable, but finally they are in.
Even though I say so myself, I think they look really really good and it was worth the effort
Waddaya think?
» YouTube video
I think I'm going to split the GI into 2 or 3 zones, so I can change the colour of a specific zone under control of software. That's just a software change.
That is frickin' awesome!
1 week later
Salisbury
2 weeks later
Mark, this looks great! So if I wanted to just add a string of RGB GI provided I had 5v power/GND, could they be connected to the P-ROC like other RGB boards? These LEDs are addressable but I don't need that for GI - one lamp is the whole string. I don't need them for lampshows either. Do they have resistors? I'd really like to try them without a teensy/arduino since I'm only interested in GI.
Quoted from Snux:Decided to take the plunge and fit these RGB bulbs into the GI. It originally took me a few hours to fit and wire up all those new sockets when I had the new playfield. Now it's taken me a couple more hours to get them all back out again, lifting staples and pulling sockets with the playfield in the cab is such fun.
Once they were out, I tidied up the now unused GI wiring and fitted these new ones. Had to cut the chain a few times and fit in some longer sections of cable, but finally they are in.
Even though I say so myself, I think they look really really good and it was worth the effort
Waddaya think?
Quoted from luvthatapex2:could they be connected to the P-ROC like other RGB boards?
Maybe... to drive the LEDs at all requires some very precise timing, which is why using the libraries for Arduino makes it easy - the hard work is all done. Even driving them all the same colour requires precise timing on the data line.
Gerry posted a while back on pinballcontrollers that he doesn't think these kind of RGB LEDs are good for pinball use, but in that post did mention that it's possible to control them via the P-ROC but not using stock firmware. His post about all that is here :
www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?topic=1307
I found that getting them to run via the Arduino was a relatively simple process and only adds the little Arduino board and an extra USB cable to the hardware mix. I also wanted lampshows and things so it was a no-brainer for me.
If you only need single colour GI, then you're probably better off trying to track down a string of LEDs that have common R/G/B lines instead of being individually addressable like mine. Then you could maybe use 3 of the drivers on the P-ROC to switch them on/off.
If you want more specifics on how I set mine up with the Arduino (it's not as scary as it sounds!), check this out:
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?topic=1239.msg13488#msg13488
1 week later
Quoted from Curbfeeler:Wow, that thing is going to be amazing. Can't wait to see it running that new code and talking to that arduino.
I think you'll like the feel of those WPC-style flippers. I did this on my pinbot and really glad I did.
Dan
Any chance you can describe what you mean here? I have a TOMCAT with worn out ejectors, and was thinking about replacing the flippers and ejects. Basically coil mechanisms to update.
What is the difference between the WPC flippers and the SYS 11... I also have a getaway... is it just feel? or is it wiring also?
Is it a direct replacement or is other wiring required.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I just found an envelope with all the stickers in it to go on the inserts. I've had it for probably 4 years and I think I paid about $33 from classic(?) for them. If anyone needs them PM me and you can have it for my cost and the shipping.
Quoted from kilmarnock1350:Any chance you can describe what you mean here?
VID has a whole thread about rebuilding flippers. It's here :
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/vids-guide-to-upgradingrebuilding-flippers
The 8th post in the thread talks about System 11. Basically you need a rebuild kit for a more modern WPC flippers, then you just need to drill a little hole.
1 month later
Quoted from agodfrey:How is it goin' any progress?
I wish. Work is still nuts, we've been working the school selection system for our 11 year old son, landscapers have been in working and to top it all my father in law got diagnosed with inoperable cancer (pancreas). So all 3 of my machines are covered in a layer of dust and I'm taking a day at a time.
Work should get a little quieter in July, with some luck, then I'll be back.
2 months later
Time to blow the cobwebs away. I finally have 3 weeks of vacation coming up with the family, so I'm taking my laptop and plan to spend a few of the evenings with a cold beer (or several) cutting some more code offline. I'll post here once I get it back home, debugged and working for real.
Kitchener, ON
Quoted from Luckydogg420:I'm glad you've got time to work on this. I've been waiting for an update. Great work. Keep it up
Thanks. This year has been hard on a number of fronts, the "pinball-mojo" has been absent for a while. I think it's finally coming back now 
Quoted from Snux:Time to blow the cobwebs away. I finally have 3 weeks of vacation coming up
As an American, I am officially jealous. I'd love to be able to take more than a week off at a time.
Quoted from uncivil_engineer:As an American, I am officially jealous. I'd love to be able to take more than a week off at a time.
What's America have to do with it? I get 4 weeks a year vacation. 
Sana'a
I had a boss tell me once that if they could afford to let me take two weeks off straight, then the company really doesn't need me. That is the kind of mentality facing most workers in America these days.
Sorry to go so far off topic... In other news, with the departure of Flash, my system 11 board has been sitting on a shelf. I think I may have a line on a suitable replacement. I should know by Saturday.
Quoted from vid1900:In the EU, every employee gets 4 weeks minimum paid vacation
Yeah. I work for an American company which has subsidiaries all over the world and when we're discussing vacation it always seems like the US folk get the worst deal. Here we get 25 days (5 weeks) paid vacation, plus 8 public holidays. In the UK the added bonus with public holidays is that if they fall on a weekend we get the Monday instead. After 20 years service (I've done 26 now) I got an extra 2 days. Other countries in Europe vary compared to the UK, some a little more, some a little less. In Italy, our office basically shuts down for the whole month of August.
This article is interesting reading :
It explains too why American tourists, especially when abroad somewhere like London, are so "full-on". They've got a lot to see and limited time to do it in. On the other hand, 2 of my 3 weeks will be in Germany, where we've only got a vague plan of what we're going to do. We'll make most of it up day-by-day once we're there (we're in the same accomodation for both weeks).
1 month later
1 week later
The last one must be included- I vote its the start up music that plays through or until you drop a coin/start game! Awesome- you have to include the voice at the beginning!
2 weeks later
Starting my homebrew project and I plan on using the one ardino and the rgb prewired lamps for my GI. I want to be able to go into red more and possibly like....purple or something. So this is pefect. Found a set of 50 which should do it. Might do some inserts too but I'm not toooo found of the star trek style of modes. That said I like what you did to let you know which mode is ready, started, and finished.
Any issues you've run into using those strands as your GI? They fit so perfectly!
Quoted from Snux:Maybe... to drive the LEDs at all requires some very precise timing, which is why using the libraries for Arduino makes it easy - the hard work is all done. Even driving them all the same colour requires precise timing on the data line.
Gerry posted a while back on pinballcontrollers that he doesn't think these kind of RGB LEDs are good for pinball use, but in that post did mention that it's possible to control them via the P-ROC but not using stock firmware. His post about all that is here :
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?topic=1307
I found that getting them to run via the Arduino was a relatively simple process and only adds the little Arduino board and an extra USB cable to the hardware mix. I also wanted lampshows and things so it was a no-brainer for me.
If you only need single colour GI, then you're probably better off trying to track down a string of LEDs that have common R/G/B lines instead of being individually addressable like mine. Then you could maybe use 3 of the drivers on the P-ROC to switch them on/off.
If you want more specifics on how I set mine up with the Arduino (it's not as scary as it sounds!), check this out:
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?topic=1239.msg13488#msg13488
Buffy is using the ws2811 12mm strands as I posted and described in that PinballControllers thread. We use the 2811s for inserts and_ GI, and drive with a modified version of Mark's code, running on a teensy --my modifications let you set the color (64 possible colors) in addition to the schedule. I ported these changes back to Arduino, and wooly now uses the 2811s as well, but they use a different form factor.
Both games were at Expo and neither game exhibited any lamp issues at all.
Some video of Buffy from Expo:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-pinball/page/7#post-2746645
Massive thanks to Mark for setting us down this path!
I think I'm going to switch over my coding from pyprocgame to MPF. When I first saw MPF a year or two back, I confess I was sceptical about how far you can get programming pinball without writing code and posted those thoughts in some of the early MPF threads. I revisited this a few weeks ago when someone bought one of my P-ROC to Sys11 interface boards and mentioned they were planning to use MPF. While I still haven't seen a "commercial grade" result from anyone using MPF (so with an immersive ruleset and looking like the finished article) yet, there are a lot of people playing around with it now and taking a look both the framework and the documentation have come a *long* way.
Although I'm fine with cutting python code, if MPF can do the "heavy lifting" and let me do the fun stuff then I'm cool with that. The documentation is awesome, and Brian has just added support for System 11 (around the A/C select relay) and those cool RGB LED panels.
Maybe I'll find that as I try out MPF, I can't achieve what I want to get to, in which case it'll be a learning experience and I'll just revert back to my pyprocgame code. But if development of the framework continues as it currently is, I think we'll be fine
I've been watching the thread about those cool RGB panels here :
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/rgb-led-panels-for-dmd-replacement
So I thought I'd try out a couple of F-14 things with it using the MPF extension. Must say these panels are very impressive (and really bright - I have them dialled down to 50% at the moment); they look a lot better in person that on video/photo.
So I just need to work out the best way to mount these in my F14
The folks in China sent me 2 sets of displays by mistake, so I thought I'd try running them as a 64x128 panel. Works fine, not sure how I'd mount them though.
It's really hard to shoot a video of these panels, I get all kinds of nasty artefacts that don't actually show up in person. So all the flicker and scan lines you see in this are not visible when you're looking at them - they actually look really cool.
Quoted from Snux:The folks in China sent me 2 sets of displays by mistake, so I thought I'd try running them as a 64x128 panel
You should totally do it. SEGA did it, lebowski is doing it. The extra dots will be worth it, it's going to be much harder to cram video into 128 x 32. You could fit it if you cut the rest of the bezel (the "williams is #1 in the world). It might get tight so you might have to get creative and tilt it to fit.
Quoted from toyotaboy:You should totally do it. SEGA did it, lebowski is doing it. The extra dots will be worth it, it's going to be much harder to cram video into 128 x 32. You could fit it if you cut the rest of the bezel (the "williams is #1 in the world). It might get tight so you might have to get creative and tilt it to fit.
Agreed. Buffy has a double height opening. As does Kuglers. Go big or go home. That's a saying, right?
I'm interested in trying a P2 or smaller panel. It's hard for me to going back to such a low pixel density for some projects...
Quoted from Snux:I think I'm going to switch over my coding from pyprocgame to MPF. When I first saw MPF a year or two back, I confess I was sceptical about how far you can get programming pinball without writing code and posted those thoughts in some of the early MPF threads. I revisited this a few weeks ago when someone bought one of my P-ROC to Sys11 interface boards and mentioned they were planning to use MPF. While I still haven't seen a "commercial grade" result from anyone using MPF (so with an immersive ruleset and looking like the finished article) yet, there are a lot of people playing around with it now and taking a look both the framework and the documentation have come a *long* way.
I read through all the MPF documentation a couple weekends ago, spent a Sunday just checking it all out. After that, and talking to Brian, I'm really impressed. There's just a lot going on there, and a lot more to come.
The more people who use it the better, because that's what will grow the suggestions, find bugs, and provide a pool of examples and solutions. Really curious to see what you think down the road a bit.
And since it's hardware agnostic that means a larger pool of people, and more flexibility.
I've actually been rethinking again, having spent some time re-aquainting myself with the code I've already written (it's almost 12 months since I was doing much with it). The codebase I have is further along than I recall and I've done most of the grunt work or "heavy lifting" (modes working, multiball working etc) and it's tightly tuned to the F-14 setup, so I think I'm actually going to continue with what I have and finagle the color display in there somehow. If I jump over to MPF it's going to take a long time (I think) just to get back to the point I'm already at.
If I wasn't so far in already switching over would be quite easy, but on closer inspection it's a bigger jump than I want to make at the moment. I'll be keeping an eye on MPF for sure though, for whatever project comes further down the line some day.
Quoted from Aurich:I read through all the MPF documentation a couple weekends ago, spent a Sunday just checking it all out. After that, and talking to Brian, I'm really impressed. There's just a lot going on there, and a lot more to come.
The more people who use it the better, because that's what will grow the suggestions, find bugs, and provide a pool of examples and solutions.
Watching MPF grow has been really cool. Brian and Gabe are obviously very passionate developers who are focused on helping folks get their custom projects running. pyprocgameHD is an equally impressive effort from Michael and Josh, and they have shown an equal amount of passion and focus on enhancing the framework and making sure it could meet the needs of everybody who uses it.
Each framework has its advantages, and since both grew either from code from or understanding of pyprocgame, they are both fundamentally rooted in a framework architecture and methodology that has proven itself over the last 5-6 years and resulted in some of the most impressive game implementations in the industry. Walking through the vendor hall in Expo made that obvious. I'm pretty sure all of the games in the P-ROC booth were programmed on pyprocgame or pyprocgameHD, as were TBL and BoP2, and all of the games in the other homebrew area were being written on MPF. That's quite a few active projects on both frameworks.
Having two passionate groups of developers working on their respective frameworks is a great thing for custom pinball developers. There are enough differences that people can choose what best fits their needs, and both groups are committed to improving the development experience for their users. I will continue supporting both efforts as best as I can, just as Brian, Gabe, Michael, and Josh actively support and help each other.
- Gerry
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com
http://www.multimorphic.com
Quoted from Snux:If I wasn't so far in already switching over would be quite easy, but on closer inspection it's a bigger jump than I want to make at the moment.
Hi Mark.
Something to think about if you haven't already. I switched my in-progress codebase over to Michael's PyprocgameHD-SkeletonGame and found that it was not only incredibly quick but that I got to keep almost all of my mode-based code. In my case, my heavy lifting code was full of bugs and I was happy to see it go, so it's not exactly the same situation, but it's something to give some thought to.
Sounds like the inability of that codebase to support a true DMD output might be a factor, but if you're already going with the chinese RGBLED/DMD, I'm curious if you couldn't drive that type of display yourself via a custom driver??? Food for thought.
Dan
Quoted from Mocean:Agreed. Buffy has a double height opening. As does Kuglers. Go big or go home. That's a saying, right?
I am running 96x192, which I find allows you to keep a 'dot' look and maximizes the space between the speakers and the standard height of the speaker panel (6.5 x 13 inch opening). However, not sure the pitch of those dots would support that density (i think this equates to .06 pitch). I do find at that size you can take animation clips and shrinkage them down and still maintain enough resolution for them to look good. I believe buffy is running 240x480, but at that point the dots tend to make it look darker then dots.
My main issue when I saw the LED RGBs at expo, is that they are too bright, almost blinding, not sure if there is a way to tone that down a touch.
Quoted from rosh:My main issue when I saw the LED RGBs at expo, is that they are too bright, almost blinding
Yes, in the code you load onto the Teensy you specify the brightness. In my example above it's dialled down to 25%. Otherwise you need to wear shades to play.
love this discussion, I develop software for stuff unrelated to pinball but am looking at a F-14 game to buy and my reading this thread is greatly elevating the chance I dive into another Project!
Awesome! Keep at it!
2 months later
Quoted from Snux:So, a big box arrived today
Snux,
Who did your play field for you?
I got my playfield from Ron Kruzman, I'm not sure where he got it from. It was already clearcoated when he got it, but he did do a little extra work on it. He's on pinside, you could drop him a line and see if he can fiind another. In theory new F14 playfields are in the works, by someone, somewhere. But they've been in that state for a few years now....
3 months later
Promoted items from Pinside Marketplace and Pinside Shops!
Reply
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Hey there! Welcome to Pinside!
Donate to PinsideGreat to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
