Hi. I'm Brian Madden, the creator (along with Gabe Knuth) of the Mission Pinball Framework. It's exciting to see everything we've been working on getting some attention!

I can tell you 100% that not a single line of the FAST platform interface code was taken from pyprocgame. I wrote our P-ROC interface first (in June), and then when I got a FAST hardware controller about two weeks ago, I used our P-ROC platform interface as a template for the FAST interface. That's why those references to P-ROC are in there. That code was stolen by me from me, not from pyprocgame. If anyone who's familiar with the inner workings of pyprocgame looks at MPF, you'll see that they are two unique things.

I'll also let you know that no money changed hands between FAST and us in either direction. They did mail me a FAST controller a few weeks ago for free. But that's it. I met the FAST guys in Seattle earlier this year and talked to them at the NW show and explained what we were doing, and they have been very supportive.

As for their effort to not make their own Python-based framework, that was their decision. Basically I showed them what we were doing with MPF and told them that we wanted to make it work with FAST, and they essentially said, "great, so now we don't have to make our own Python framework, and the industry will be better off with a platform-independent framework." So they've absolutely been supportive in that regard. I don't know what their plans are around other frameworks, but we're excited to add FAST support to ours.

That said, I've been using a P-ROC for a few years, and Gerry Stellenberg as *also* been very supportive of what we're doing in the framework. In fact we have a Mission Pinball Framework subforum on Gerry's pinballcontrollers.com website, and we'll have our Big Shot EM-to-SS conversion running the Mission Pinball Framework on P-ROC hardware in Gerry's booth at the Expo.

So big error on my part not to clean up the comments for our FAST interface, but to be clear when you run our framework with FAST hardware, there is not one single line of code from pyprocgame there. (We do use libpinproc and pypinproc of course since those are the drivers for P-ROC.)

Also if you look at our P-ROC platform interface module (https://github.com/missionpinball/mpf/blob/dev/mpf/platform/p_roc.py), you'll see that we pulled some code for the hardware configuration of the P-ROC from pyprocgame, but that's fully credited in the comments, and pyprocgame is available via the MIT license, and since it's in our module for the P-ROC we're fine with it since it's needed to talk to a P-ROC.

Finally, as for FAST's plans for WPC2.0 and all that, at this point I don't know what their plans are, but I can tell you I would love it if some of these games were written with our framework! I know that they have some things to work out around licensing and DRM, and I hope that we can make MPF work with whatever they do so people can use MPF to write and sell officially-licensed games. (MPF itself is released under the MIT license, so anyone can do whatever they want with it.)

Oh, also I hope that P-ROC and FAST are just the tip of the iceberg for us. I talked to Ben Heck and the NW show too, and if he ever sells the PinHeck boards then I would assume we could support that too. (Even though it has its own PIC32 microprocessor, if we could get a firmware rev for it that talked USB then we should be able to add it to MPF. Same for Visual Pinball and hopefully whatever JJP has in WOZ.

All good comments...

I want to give credit where credit is due. P-ROC and pyprocgame came out in 2009, and I never even heard of them until early last year. I'm proud of my contributions back to pyprocgame since then, but I wouldn't call me a driving force. It's a pretty great community and I'm only a tiny piece.

My (tiny) influence aside, it's important to remember that the P-ROC as a hardware device has certain requirements, so any framework will have some similar concepts. Gerry and Adam wrote pypinproc (the low level python-to-C bridge) for their hardware driver (libpinproc), so MPF and pyprocgame both have access to the same system calls and will therefore have a lot in common. But above that, I would argue that pyprocgame and MPF are pretty different. (Though really it doesn't matter. It's more of an academic conversion.)

Agreed 100% (in the context of a framework). We are creating a Python framework so now FAST doesn't have to. That is absolutely true. But we're fine with it. To be honest we hope that MPF is so good that people also perceive that we're doing some legwork for the P-ROC. If you look at some of the other threads on pinside about MPF, you'll see that the whole reason it came into existence was because we were frustrated that everyone writing a game using pyprocgame had to reinvent the wheel. Certainly that's true if you look at the six or eight complete (or nearly complete) pyprocgame-based games in GitHub. (Again, this is not a knock at pyprocgame. It's just that pyprocgame is a starting point. It can get you 10% of the way there before you start having to write your own custom code. We wanted to create something that could get you 90% of the way there before you had to start writing your own code.)

In fact we started the MPF as an extension of pyprocgame. (The original intention was that we'd just write a whole bunch of add-ons and stuff.) We started digging into it and realized we had to subclass the crap out of everything in pyprocgame, and Gabe and I started having conversations like, "You know, there is zero chance anything we write will be compatible with existing pyprocgame games, and for an extra 10% of work we could just write our own standalone framework which we could do exactly our way." It was around this time that we read about FAST and then about 5 seconds before we said, "Oh yeah, this is a no-brainer. Let's just write this thing ourselves and make it platform-independent."

This is an interesting issue. It's funny how so many people are all about the MIT license and not liking the restrictions of GPL, but then as soon as someone else does something they don't like with their code then suddenly everyone's all pissed off. I've always kind of responded like, "well, if you didn't want people doing whatever they wanted with your code, then why did you explicitly grant them the license to do so?"

So I encourage you not to be bugged about this because if Gerry and Adam didn't want it, then they wouldn't have released their code under MIT.

Even for Gabe and me, we fully understand the ramifications of releasing MPF under MIT. If Stern wants to take it tomorrow and find & replace "mpf" with "stern", they're welcome to. That won't stop us from still working on MPF to get it to where we believe it can be (which will take many years).

Eh, people keep saying this, but there have been a half-dozen pinball controllers which entered the market since the P-ROC. PinHECK, PINterface, the one that Sweet Juicy Melons used (whose name escapes me at the moment).. I don't know why everyone is all mad at FAST for entering the market while I haven't heard anyone comment on these others.

But the bigger point is this is just the way the world works. One company invented and starting selling the automobile, and now there are dozens of makers. Same for cell phones, microprocessors, sneakers, and casual fast dining establishments. Personally I don't even care if FAST is better or worse than P-ROC or anyone else. I just love that there are lots of choices for customers.

Well first of all, remember that WPC 2.0 and FH 2.0, TOTAN 2.0, etc... all those are just talk now... nothing more than a gleam in their fathers' eyes. I don't think there's anything preventing anyone from building a fully licensed "2.0" game on the P-ROC or PinHECK or any other platform as long as the licensee can demonstrate to the original license holders that they're taking steps to protect their IP. (i.e. they have to have some kind of DRM to make sure the licensed bits can't just be copied around, etc.)

The FAST board has an ARM processor (three of them, actually) on board as well as local flash storage (I'm not talking about the Beaglebone port, I'm talking about the actual controller board itself), and those guys talk about how they could essentially "lock" the DRM-protected bits (dots and audio mainly) to a certain hardware board, so if you buy a 2.0 game and then want to give it to someone else, you'd have to give them your original FAST board too.

The P-ROC has an FPGA on board. I don't know how much room Gerry has (in terms of unused gates), but I'm sure there's something he could do there. Maybe he could add something to the firmware where each P-ROC has a unique serial number or a certificate or whatever which talks to a DRM module on the host computer. The thing is that someone has to sit down and design that scheme, and that can't be Gabe or I because we don't know how to do that. But the original IP holders are willing to talk.. it's just that people need to come to them with a plan that's like, "ok, here's how we can protect your IP."

I can't agree enough! We'll crush those beers together some day I'm sure...

I've been working with the FAST hardware for the past year in various prototype forms. I can tell you, (1) Aaron is a very enthusiastic guy, and (2) it is real. That said when I first met them at the NW show a year ago, I think they thought they were only a few months away from shipping. But the revisions since then have been great. Over 3 or 4 turns of boards, in my mind they've gone from, "Yeah, I think we can make the Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) work on here" to "OMG I'm so excited for the stuff we can do on their platform!" (MPF is platform-independent, so we write separate platform interfaces for P-ROC, FAST, etc.)

For me as a software guy, it's been kind of cool to be able to bounce ideas around them as the hardware is being developed.. things like "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..." turn into an email a week later, "Try this firmware to see it in action."

From the MPF standpoint, I think we'll get our FAST platform interface wrapped up next week. I'm going to fly up to Seattle to throw MPF on one of the machines that FAST has, and the plan is they'll bring that to the show. (I can't make it to the show itself, but Gabe Knuth, the other guy writing MPF with me, will be there.)

BTW lots of the videos that we've posted on our blog and our YouTube page have been on FAST hardware. (We tend to swap out FAST and P-ROC on our dev machines because we want to keep making sure MPF works on both.)

Man.. so I clicked on this just for yucks, but Aaron's got multiple cameras and a camera microscope thing and he's narrating actually building a SMT board... It's certainly a lot more interesting than most of the garbage on tv! Nice work guys.

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Here are some random photos of the FAST Pinball booth at the NW show. There were four custom machines there in various states of completion, The Muppet Show, Tattoo Mystique, Steampunk Royale, and Green Out. The TOTAN had FAST's new drop-in RGB LED DMD. At the front of the booth, Mike setup his rotisserie and was wiring up a playfield he just CNC'ed, and there was also a 1977 Sega Space Shuttle (which never went into production) from local pinhead James Edes which other guys were wiring up. He was busy running the tournament but kept on coming by to check on progress. We (well, not me, other guys) finished the Space Shuttle wiring, and today I'm going to build up an MPF config to get it running. Working on those two playfields in the front of the booth really drew people in ("Hey what are you building?"), and then we could tell them that the four machines behind them were home-built and show them how everything worked. Lots of great conversations and overall pinball building fun!

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Hi Everyone! I joined FAST Pinball in February, and one of the things I've been working on has been getting our technical documentation collected, written, and published. If you haven't seen it yet, I'm happy to announce that docs.fastpinball.com went live last month!

Some highlights:

* Product manuals (with hook up instructions, specs, diagrams, etc.)
* A complete 13-part guide to wiring your pinball machine
* Getting started tutorials
* FAST Serial Protocol Reference
* Platform details (for the FAST Modern, FAST Retro, and FAST Mod platforms)

I'm one of those weird geeks who really likes writing documentation. (Like, I really REALLY like it. I wrote books and tech manuals in my previous career before joining FAST!) Reach out (either via email [email protected]) or send me a PM if you have specific doc requests.

Here are a few random screenshots to show you the type of stuff on the docs site. Dig in, have fun, and make pinball!

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Since this was posted, we’ve consolidated our URLs. All these links are now https://fastpinball.com/docs

We have an RGB LED DMD (wow that's a lot of letters) which can be a drop-in replacement for original DMDs. (Product page is here, I assume this is the one you're talking about?) It should work in any machine that has the 14-pin DMD connector as a drop in replacement (and like any LED DMD, it only needs 12V and not the original high voltage). My "to do" list includes testing this on all the various machine types. We have this on several of our WPC machines, but it should work on SAM, White Star, SPIKE 1, etc. (Worst case we would have to adjust some timing and add a menu option. And when I say "we", I mean ecurtz as he's the one who wrote all the code for this.)

Since those original machines just did four brightness levels of orange/red (well, some were 16, but let's just call it four for now), there's a menu where you can set what four RGB colors you want for each of the four shades. This means that it essentially can become any "color" replacement DMD you want.. set it to four shades of green or pink or orange or whatever you want. The menu interface lets you map any hex color to the original shades, so you can get really trippy and mix colors which doesn't look as crazy as you'd think in some machines. (I mean like use black, red, purple, white, for example, for the original 0,1,2,3 brightness levels.)

This DMD product also has a USB port on it where you can attach to it via any host computer and send DMD frames via the FAST Serial Protocol. In that case you get the full RGB 16.7M color options for full color DMD at up to about 20fps. That is how people use it in the homebrew community for a full color DMD.

If you are working on a 2.0 game and you want to keep the DMD look, then you could also use this DMD. It would be 4 shades (though set to any color you want) for the 1.0 / original game running via our FAST emulation (also thanks to @ecurtz), and then full color for the 2.0 game.

Getting back to your actual question, at this time if you buy this RGB LED DMD and drop it into an original machine with no other FAST hardware, you will just get the ability to recolor the four original shades. It won't let you fully colorize every original frame or replace original frames.

Also quick note that the version of this DMD listed on our docs site has a lot of other components on it to allow plugging in additional expansion modules. We've since evolved our approach to this (culminating with the FAST Retro Platform we announced at TPF last month) which moves those components from the DMD to the FAST Retro Controller, so future LED DMDs from FAST will look different on the back but will essentially be functionally identical.

All that said, this space is changing and evolving quickly, and we have lots of plans and partnerships in the works. We'll keep you posted!

Hi Everyone!

You probably saw that Aaron and I gave a talk at TPF 2022 this past March. It was streamed via Twitch during the show, and Ed & the team at Texas Pinball just reposted all the streams to YouTube. I wanted to link our talk here in case you haven't seen it:

In this talk (about 50 minutes), Aaron and I walked through:

* Who is FAST Pinball
* A quick look at a bunch of the homebrew games built on the FAST Modern Platform
* Our new Neuron Controller
* Our new Audio Interface Board (AMP, computer safe shutdown, LCD panel controls, ...)
* The FAST Retro Platform (System 11, WPC-89, WPC-95)
* The new FAST Mod Platform (intelligent mods & integrations for modern and retro machines)
* The upcoming FAST Developer Program
* Plus lots of little things about why pinball is awesome.

Thanks everyone. Happy pinballing!
Brian

Hi Everyone!

I just sent out the June edition of our "FAST Friends" newsletter. You can read the web version at https://www.fastpinball.com/s/stories/fast-friends-newsletter-june-2022. You can subscribe to the newsletter from the bottom of any page at fastpinball.com, or just PM me.

This month we focused completely on the FAST Pinball community presence at NWPAS (Northwest Pinball & Arcade Show) June 3-5. We had a 70-foot long booth with 16 pinball machines running various types of FAST hardware:

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FunHouse, Medieval Madness, and Cyclone all running the FAST Retro Platform running our emulation for original classic gameplay

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FunHouse Rudy's Nightmare (Pedretti), TOTAN The Forgotten Tales (Mirco), NGG: Battle for the Green (Cardona), and SOF: Swords of Vengeance (Anthony van Winkle) conversion kits powered by the FAST Retro Platform

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Fathom Revisited (Haggis), a new machine powered by the FAST Modern Platform

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Lots of homebrews, including Fight Club (Mike Becker)

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Led Zeppelin (Steve Kondris)

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Baby Pac-Man Space retheme (Brendan)

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Mass Effect 2 (Anthony van Winkle)

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Harley Quinn (Anthony van Winkle)

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and Brian Cox's "Any Machine", a custom-cabinet with interchangeable physical playfields focusing on the early Bally SS era. Brian brought Kiss, Flash Gordon, and Star Trek to the show and swapped them out every hour. (And he has like 10 more different games at home, all with new code!)

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DR Game Systems: Steve, Rick, and Dan were there, showing off the CNC, routing, printing, art, graphics, etc. capabilities they have for the custom and homebrew pinball and arcade scene.

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And we had a little demo area showing our various boards and how they work.

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It was such an awesome show, check out the newsletter link for details on everything!

Oh, also, unrelated, we have Nano Controllers back in stock now, so if you've been waiting to buy a starter bundle for the past few months, they are now available again.

Happy Pinballing!
Brian (and Aaron, Dave, and Eli)

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Hi Everyone!

We just sent out the July edition of our FAST Friends newsletter. You can read it online here: https://www.fastpinball.com/s/stories/fast-friends-newsletter-july-2022

This month we focused on videos. Most of them were demos and interviews from us and our community members at the Northwest Pinball & Arcade show last month. We also highlighted recent tutorial videos as well as reminding everyone how awesome Steve's (The Pinball Room) "How to Build a Pinball Machine" YouTube series is!

In general our YouTube channel is starting to pick up. Check out the latest / follow us there: https://youtube.com/fastpinball

FAST Pinball YouTube channel

Hi Everyone!

We're just recovering from a super fun and amazing Chicago Pinball Expo 2022! If you weren't able to attend the show, I just wrote a blog post detailing and recapping everything we showed off and talked about. That blog post is here:

https://fastpinball.com/blog/2022/10/24/fast-pinball-booth-tour-and-show-recap-of-the-chicago-pinball-expo-2022/

Here's some eye candy from the post. Happy pinballing!

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I would expect that the Retro hardware will start becoming available to hobbyists next year. You'll see a phased rollout as we certify each game. So it won't be like "The System 11 controller is released now", rather, it will be like, "Today we are releasing the System 11 board for SOF and WW, next month is Fire, next month is HS," etc.

The retro boards will immediately allow you to play the classic game ROMs directly from the boards (and get the ability to use mods based on the expansion bus), and then you'll also be able to connect to them via USB to take control of the machine for writing new game code. It's our intention that we'll also release MPF templates which map out the hardware and devices and stuff for each machine as we release them, giving you a head start on any new game code you write.

FAST Friends October newsletter just went out. You can also see it online via: https://fastpinball.com/blog/2022/10/25/fast-friends-newsletter-october-2022/

This month, it's a recap of Expo, a bit about our blog, and an answer to the question "When will your starter bundles be back in stock?" (Preview: by the end of the year, except they will be based on the next-gen FAST Neuron platform and not the existing FAST Nano platform.) Details in the link.

Happy Pinballing!

Hi Everyone,

The November edition of our FAST Friends newsletter just came out. You can read the web version here:

https://fastpinball.com/blog/2022/11/22/fast-friends-newsletter-november-2022

Topics this month include:

* Neuron Controllers should ship in December
* (This also means starter bundles will be back in stock)
* Lots of links to new documentation we've started writing for the Neuron-based systems
* Plus links to other fun docs like "How to pick a power supply for your homebrew pinball machine"
* The latest on the various FAST platform additions to MPF

Happy Thanksgiving, and Happy Pinballing!

Hah, right on man! Thanks!

Wow we've come so far in the past 8-9 years! I still can't believe how fun this all is!

Big news! FAST Neuron Controllers, and starter bundles based on them, are now available in the FAST Pinball online shop!

In fact today we're launching the Neuron Controller and our entire "next gen" modern platform. Full details are here:

https://fastpinball.com/blog/2022/12/14/fast-neuron-starter-bundles-are-in-stock/

Some highlights of what's new:

• The Neuron builds upon and refines the performance and reliability we've had with our Nano and Core Controllers over the past 8 years.
• All of the boards in the Neuron system have been designed to work together in the prescriptive and integrated way. We've thought about every connector, every wire, and every pin, to ensure everything is as convenient, performant, and safe as possible.
• The Neuron platform introduces true "machine control", with integrated power system voltage and current monitoring, bad fuse detection, fault detection, as well as coordinated smart power management between the host PC, LCD, audio system, and even the main pinball machine itself.
• We have completely removed the 5V power supply from the pinball machine, simplifying wiring and allow for longer wiring runs with more connectors to be used. Boards that need other voltages (e.g. 5V for LEDs) generate it locally from the 12V supply.
• Power distribution is built into the system, including dedicated main/trunk/branch circuits for the backbox, topper, cabinet, and playfield.
• "Autofire" switch + driver pairs no longer need to be connected to the same I/O board. (e.g. now you can plug your flipper buttons into the cabinet I/O board and your flipper coils and EOS switches into a playfield I/O board, or plug a pop bumper coil into one I/O board while its switch is connected to another.)
• The new FAST Expansion Bus with Expansion Boards allow massive amounts of distributed "lights and motion" in your machine (RGB LEDs, servos, etc.), future proofed for more types of LEDs. (WS2812, APA-102, RGBW in addition to RGB)

We also have lots of new wiring guides, unboxing tutorials, and documentation for the new stuff. There are lots of links in the blog post I posted above. But I've attached some fun photos from the docs to see what you're in for.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. We have many more exciting products in the pipeline which will be released in 2023, including a dedicated audio platform (built around the FAST Audio Interface), a purpose-built Cabinet I/O Board, and several other things we haven't announced yet!

Happy pinballing everyone!
Brian

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Hello FAST Pinball makers!

I posted this to the homebrew thread, but I wanted to share here too. At the Northwest Pinball & Arcade show last weekend, we ran a little sub-event called PinDevCon, a devcon / meetup / gathering for pinball makers. We had a little theater in the expo hall with 14 talks over the three days, and they were all video recorded and are available now here:

https://fastpinball.com/pindevcon/

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Talks (with videos):

• Hardware hacking your pinball machine with FAST Pinball
• Swords of Vengeance: Music and Audio (with the composer)
• Modern Pinball Machine Wiring
• The business of "2.0" pinball conversion projects
• Mission Pinball Framework (MPF) - How it works under the hood
• The making of "The Haunted Cruise" AR pinball machine
• Homebrew maker chat - Sean Irby STIrby (Eight Ball Beyond)
• Homebrew maker chat - Mike Becker Mbecker (Fight Club)
• Homebrew maker chat - Spencer Holmes (Futurama)
• Homebrew maker chat - Joel Kaiser (Boys Night Out)
• Homebrew maker chat - Anthony van Winkle avanwinkle (Swords of Vengeance)
• Homebrew maker chat - Lin Linolium (Frozen, Haunted Cruise)
• Homebrew maker chat - Brian Cox (about 20 machines, including Tattoo Mystique and several 1980s Bally conversions)
• Homebrew maker chat - Jack Bridges (The Muppet Show)

I couldn't find Pinside links for all the makers & their games, let me know if I missed any! This event was a lot of fun and we'll definitely do it again next year and/or maybe at other shows? There's a survey link on the site for people who want to volunteer to help, or who want to speak at future events.

Happy pinball making!
Brian

New FAST Pinball product announcement: Cabinet I/O board

We just released our cabinet I/O board, a special purpose I/O board designed for placement in the pinball cabinet itself (typically mounted on the left side near the front of the machine). This board handles I/O for all cabinet switches (flipper buttons, start button, tilt, etc.), as well as the coin door interface, a bill validator or ticket reader, low current drivers for LEDs (for the coin door and lighted buttons), a single high-current driver (typically for a knocker). It receives power via a dedicated header on the Playfield Interchange Board and also features a dedicated high-current 12V power output header for powering a shaker motor or other 12V devices in the cabinet.

* Announcement blog post
* Product Page
* Wiring Guide

And some random photos from the various docs:

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Man if stuff like these illustrations is what you’ve been waiting for, check out the complete wiring guide for the entire FAST modern platform: https://fastpinball.com/wiring/neuron/

It's like 20 guides with tons of illustrations walking you through complete wiring of an entire machine (and in the safe and most proper way that could pass FCC and UL testing)... They’re fun reads for geeks, and seriously, they will make you smarter about pinball machine wiring in general (even if you never intend to build a homebrew).

random illustrations from random pages in that guide:

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