Here's a little something I'm making for my daughter...

P-Roc
Unity3D
P4 2.8ghz HT
256mb ram
Geforce 7800
Windows XP Home

P-Roc
Unity3D
P4 2.8ghz HT
256mb ram
Geforce 7800
Windows XP Home

Williams style Flippers, Slingshots, and auto-plunger.
Old bally 1-ball trough (though it was designed with a WPC trough in mind for future itterations).
Williams Jet bumer

Tell me about it . It's still there, gotta watching in youtube though.

Well played...
Not being sold. It's a one off for my daughter.

Stop on by some time. Any Pinsider in the area is welcome.

Nah, what's the fun in that?

I actually have a few playfield todos:
1) Resolder the ramp... the solder joints are broken because I needed to rebend and shift the thing around (hence why the ball flew off it into the plunger lane)
2) Move the blue "MAGIC" targets. I just don't like how the ball bounces off of those. Also I want to create more space for #3.
3) Get a Totan spinning lamp assembly, put it in the middle of the playfield (around where the blue targerts are now) and replace the lamp with Elsa. So you spin Elsa causing "magic" to occur or something... I dunno yet.
4) Replace the hidden yellow target (far left under the Anna castle) with a saucer/kickout.

Of course. I'll be building a custom cabinet over the next couple weeks.

It's currently sitting in an old Supersonic cab.

Lmao!
Nah, generally I've been busy with real life, and unheated garages in New England are not the best place to tinker in during the winter. Haunted Cruise is a very non-trivial game to work on- though, if you've noticed, this past month I did work on it a little bit.

Same idea. I wrapped my P-Roc "engine" in another plugin for unity. The plug-in handles basic things like hardware updates and switch reads. Ultimately I'd like to build a general interface plugin so I can swap between P-Roc/Fast/P2k/whatever just by changing a DLL (0 game logic changes). It's not at that point yet sadly.

Maybe sometime later this year (fall or something) I'll release the P-Roc plugin.

Last night I finished designing the lower cabinet body, so today I started to build it! The basic shell is all set, I just need to cut the details (button holes, coin door hole, speaker hole, etc). I also need to buy a Lock Miter bit... I don't have one of those quite yet.

Building this cabinet is, of course, a crash-course practice run for the larger Haunted Cruise cabinet later this year...

I'm using general 3/4" plywood from home depot for this. Ultimately I'll fill and sand the sides smooth before priming and decaling.

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I finally got to adding LED driving software and hardware to the game. This video shows a little test of it working. Next step is to cut the led strip up and put the lamps where they actually need to go.
I'm using SW2811 leds, and they're being driven by an AllPixel.

I made the insert led brackets and mounted led strip segments in them. I'm waiting on a shipment of molex connectors now... hopefully they'll arrive in the coming week.

I started with a paper template cut to fit in the correct spot, then I arranged those templates on a piece of wood and routed out the pieces from a piece of plexiglass. Finally I test-fitted the plexiglass then cleaned them up (fillet/chamfered corners, rounder sections, ect). I hot glued the leds into place once everything was fitted.

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Been too busy with work. Haven't touched any of my pin projects at all

Last week was nice, so I finally nailed and glued the cabinet body together

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Also, a new toy arrived in the mail last tues....

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Amazing things can now be done! WeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeee!!

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A quick mounting test of some of the new components. The spinner still needs a little bit of tweaking, but the guides work quite well

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Yes! .. but I never really left

Lots of stuff to talk about, so here goes-

Once I built the first design, I noticed a bunch of play issues that I kinda really wanted to change. So, behind the scenes, I've been tweaking the playfield layout over the past couple months.

I realized the row of targets above the flippers just wasn't fun for a 3 year old (or anyone really). Not because they were difficult to hit- the placement made them very easy to hit! But because the ball would rocket straight back at the flippers/drain with little time to react. This, of course, was not desirable for an "entry level" pin. Not only that, the jet didn't really do much, nor was it easy or satisfying to shoot over to it. And the ramp! That ramp is almost non-hitable! The sharp curve from left to right then up a the steep incline just was too much for the ball.

The new design now fixes (I hope) all those issues. The ramp entry curvature is much more gradual then it was, and the upwards slope begins earlier. The left orbit has been changed from a hidden target now to a hidden saucer. This allows the "Anna Castle" to hold the ball for stuff (rewards/mode start/whatever). Oh, I added the spinner back in too.

The centre area is the largest change. As I posted yesterday, I designed and built a "Spinning Elsa" assembly. Basically it's a TotAN lamp type spinning assembly with a Disney Infinity Elsa figure on top. Each spin will spell out a letter in "MAGIC"... I don't know what that'll affect yet, but it's there! Next, the 5 blue targets have been chopped down to 4 targets in a more CftBL snackbar target pattern. This means the ball will no longer rocket back to the flippers! Finally, there is a new centre shot that feeds int to the jet bumper area.

I also added more inserts. LOTS more. Some inserts are planned to just be pretty things underneath the playfield art like shimmering glowing snowflakes and such. I also have an idea for a really cool whole-table effect I want to add. More about that some other time

I think these changes will play much better then the original design.

PS. The targets in the render are square, but the real targets will still be round.
PPS. I haven't modeled the wireform ramp out in cad yet, but it will still exist in largely the same shape as it does in the current build.

Current OLD Design:

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NEW Design:

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Render with WIP playfield art. Uses official art and some images found on the web (dunno if they're official or fan). I'm just composing them to look nice in the table.

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If anything the ball should be orange since you kinda play the roll of Anna. But no, silver it stays.

First-pass playfield art. What do y'all think? Good? Bad? Missing something? My daughter can't read yet so I wanted it be a bit more icon driven rather then text driven.

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Art pass 2! A bunch of things have changed:
1) The background now has some new spot-imagery including Oaken's Trading Post, Arendelle Castle, Snowy Woods, and shifting Elsa's castle to the right side a bit.
2) All insert icons have been adjusted to show more of the insert itself rather then completely cover it. Also the centre snowflake has light cut-outs now so lamps can shimmer through it. All bare insert spots are highlighted with bright green in this image.
3) The Elsa spinner magic area has some sparkle details
4) Weselton is no longer 3 heads, he has a full body and a little tapestry connecting his targets with his modes.
5) More text! Because why not.

I still need to figure out what I want to do with the Olaf hot/cold area. The solid colours there just looks bleh now with the other BG changes. Finally, I may do a universal text size pass. It's possible the text is just too big.

That's it for today!

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The weather this week has been really nice. I've done a lot of cabinet work.

-The cabinet now has legs, a coin door, and buttons
-The backbox is now done except for a couple black-paint touch ups (Caused when I the exact-o knife trimmed the side art a bit too close to the wood), and adding some leds to light the backglass.

I hope to add in the computer/P-roc system this weekend and start cutting the new playfield next week.

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This is the CPU/Control unit I have in the game
CPU: i3-3240
RAM: 1 gb
GPU: Ge-force 610
HDD: 64GB Kingston SSD
Power: 350w ATX
OS: Windows 7 Pro
P-Roc + 1 Power/Driver master board
Audio Amp: Lepai LP-168HA
LED Driver: All-Pixel

Definitely not a powerhouse, but runs the game perfectly fine!

The unit is located on the bottom of the cabinet under the playfield... yes yes I know that's not ideal, but the cab is small and I gotta put the thing somewhere. I could split it up backbox/cab but that would make removal and maintenance really annoying. As it stands now, I only need to unplug 6 connectors to remove the whole unit (Similar to EM inner-cabinet logic slabs).

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Yeah, that's on the todo list. I have a lot of spare aluminum sheets. I was thinking of folding one of them to cover the unit (the aluminum would be grounded of course).

This is the final playfield art! The full size is 150 dpi 21"x27"

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WHOOPS! Thanks!

Fixed...

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♪ I've been working on the plaaaaaaaaaay-fieeeeeeeld aaaall the live long moooooonth~~ ♪
♪ I've been working on the plaaaaaaaaaay-fieeeeeeeld just to pass the day(s) awaaaaaaay~~ ♪

My clear coat messed up this print- a blotch popped out and soaked a section on the right about the size of a dime...
BUT! Everything lines up great! I can also use this print to practice trimming all the inserts and holes too. I'm using an exact-o knife and it's a bit tedious Oh well.

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I printed this at staples on their semi-gloss wide format paper. I'm clear coating the paper a dozen times or so with spray-clear to protect the image before trimming it. Each insert is being cut out with an exact-o knife (so I can get all the odd text and art shape's contours) to expose pieces of the insert below for more accurate lighting visuals. Finally I'll glue the overlay onto the wood and clear coat it with 3 or 4 layers of Du Pont clear (wet sanding between each layer) to sandwich everything together and get a nice smooth surface. I think that will last fairly well.

I felt the typical white-under-plastics was kinda boring, and there was already a really nice Fozen ice pattern used in some media- so I used it!

I posted in another thread I started making test plastics. Otherwise not a lot I'm afraid. I've been a bit busy with other things

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It's definitely getting me back into the mood to finish this game. I just need to find the time to do it

New toy! Yay laziness!

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Don’t give away our secrets!

The brand is Digital Wood Carver. I got it off craigslist for cheap. It’s from 2011- I’m the 3rd owner. Not perfect by any means but does the job.

Really though, 3 hours to automatically cut a play field is much better then 2 weeks on and off by hand.
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That playfield was the first thing I cut with this machine (just picked it up yesterday). I simplified the insert holes to save time. The next cut will have all things as one would expect. I’ll hopefully cut it on Monday.

Now that I have this thing I’ll be working on these projects a bit more because of the time saving it gives me. In a couple weeks I’ll do a 3 pass cut for a new haunted cruse play field as well... it really needs one...

As promised here’s a new cut. This time it’s much better and almost correct! Yay! A few of the inserts are slightly too large for my liking. The next cut later this week will probably be the final.

Oh, I did 2 passes- top and bottom. Both passes used a 2mm tool.

Total cut time:
* bottom 15 mins
* top 4 hours-ish

-Lin

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I broke the bank with these.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B073RKBKXT

Plunge speed: 10 cpm
Cut speed: 50 cpm
Step increment: 1/16”
Step over: 40%

If you look closely there is some jittering. That’s caused by the router gantry wobbling a little not the bits. On the smaller ball-screw cnc the edges are clean and sharp.

Well, the machine was at Pintastic this past weekend. It wasn't playable but it was there

I did a little bit more work on it today. The game is now running on Linux (this weekend it was running on Windows 7), and I figured out why half the solenoids didn't work.

The rest of the summer I'm going to try to finish the cabinet... painting, art, rails, lockdown bar, etc

Nah, I'll swap out a couple modes and art to add Frozen 2 movie features as well

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I'm live on https://www.twitch.tv/thereallinolium working on a new switch harness for frozen! Come join!

Out with the old...

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In with the new

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I spent some time this past week hooking up the new switch matrix, rebuilding my plugins to work on x64 machines, and fixing some minor memory leaks. The table is now controllable from my laptop through unity! w00t! Previously I could only spoof switches and modes, I would need to make a build and deploy to the cabinet to actually test things.

It seems like all the cool kids are streaming their development these days, I may as well start doing that too. I'll start streaming weekly towards the end of the month... I need a couple more cameras to arrive first

I do have a stream idea already for march/april. A wicked long and boring one! 5 hour, uncut, CNC stream milling a new version of the playfield! YAY! ...Yeah I found problems with this one now that I really have power and gameplay working on it

Here's what my shoe-horned dev environment looks like right now XD

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Slow and steady wires the lamps…

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New playfield. New special effects. See you at Pintastic in June!

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I have 110 lamps on this machine... I'm too lazy and cheap to pin every connector

Can’t get pre-pinned ones. Wrong size and colours. Needs to be custom

Ramp

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I bought one last month
32”w 28”d 6”h forming area. 220vac @ 50a. Definitely not the best around, but extremely good for for the price I paid

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Those ramps are available to buy
https://pu-parts.com/creature-from-the-black-lagoon-williams-bally-ramps

Frozen is currently at the Electro Mechanical Pinball Museum in Pawtucket, RI!
I will be adding code and rule updates over the course of the next couple weeks. Head on over and check it out!
I am also bringing Frozen to Pintastic at the end of the month
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See y'all in a couple weeks at Chicago Expo!