Hello together, happy to see so much feedback on LISY, will try to answer all your questions...
At first the important part: as jabdoa said this is a non-profit project. The basic idea was born around ten years ago http://www.flipperkeller.de/projekte/LiSy80.html Sorry, German only on that old page but the pictures are worth a look.
The main goal is to attract more people to these old Gottlieb pinball machines by providing an affordable way to replace the old, usually ‘battery damaged’, Gottlieb MPUs. As I side effect LISY also provide an easy way to do diagnosing your Gottlieb pinball machine with the integrated ‘LISYcontrol’ which can accessed by a standard web browser (see images attached).
And, last but not least, with the latest version you can create your own gameplay by using MPF.

- The emulation software is based on pinmame and it is part of piname source on sourceforge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/pinmame/ ) since revision r4296. (Unix tree only)
- LISYcontrol is part of the image which you can download for free (source including)
- For the 3 PICs ( PIC18F45K22 ) I can provide the binary if there is interest
- I do sell the pcb at cost price

At the moment I decided not to publish the PIC source code nor the pcb design. Main reason is that I do want to prevent that someone else ‘jumps on the train’ and doing profit with it and because I do want have some overview who is using LISY.

@KenLayton: I did shipping only to Europe in the past but lets see how best to bring LISY to US, I’m open for suggestions! And as you mentioned Bally: At the moment I’m working on a Bally Version ‘LISY35’ which will replace old Bally MPUs ( AS2518-35). More or less the same design as LISY1 & LISY80, a Raspberry PI in ‘the middle’ and 3 PICs around. Hope it will not take another ten years to finish it

@20eyes, @zacaj: Yes, no old RIOT design, I’m using the three PICs as port extender and for the ‘real time’ parts like displays refresh and switch scanning, where with Linux there is guarantee that it is always ‘on time’, resulting in display flicker and missing switches.

Ralf

LISYcontrol_Lamps (resized).jpg

LISYcontrol_Switches (resized).jpg

The LCD display would require another 6 I/O lines from the PI, which I do not have available, and: the 'in-build' Webserver LISYcontrol does provide this already, only I wireless LAN (or with a small adapter an ethernet connection) and a webbrowser ( e.g. on a pad) is needed. Once you have tried LISYcontrol, you will love it

On the shipping question I'm open for suggestions. Usually I only ship the pcb and three programed PICs ( the 'Base Set'). However if you are able to flash the Microchip PIC18 chips, I can provide you with the binaries, so it will be the pcb only.
On the manual side, yes i wrote a 'user manual' in english and can make the translation of the two assembly guides, no problem. If you take a look at the german version ( 'Aufbau der Platine' ) there is a bom included. Maybe 'someone' need to check if the parts are available in US ..

The two links to the shopping cards to the german distributor 'Reichelt' on lisy80.com do include all needed parts EXCEPT the 'Base Set, the Sound Option and the RPI.

On the sound question: Without the in the manual described 'Sound option' LISY uses the original sound board. With the Sound Option ( Justboom sound or similar PHAT soundcard ) it is possible to play soundfiles (wav) from the SD card. However Soundoption is in 'Beta state' at the moment, so for exampel background sound is not working at the moment.

@woz: For getting an impression on boot time, take a look here:

which shows my Charlies Angels with a LISY1 board.
After switching ON the pinball machine the displays showing the LISY1 boot message, as this is done by the display PIC it comes up right away.
In the background the RPI is booting up Linux and LISY/PinMame.
After round about 25 seconds PinMame is coming up and tries to load the rom-set, this took another 10-15 seconds.
So overall boot time wit a PI-Zero is around 40 seconds. If you use a PI3 you can reduce it to 20 seconds or so ...

It is a 18F45K22

Borgdog is right, the 'Base Set' is for 30 Euro, the components are round about 20 Euro and the RPI is about 10 Euro if you take the PI-Zero-WLAN, 5 Euro if you take the PI-Zero without WLAN.
So in sum you will have appr. 55-60 Euro, plus shipping cost, for a complete set.
Shipping costs can be minimized if we find a way to do most of the shipping from within US.
For example I can send someone a bunch of pcb who will then do the shipping piece by piece.

I checked on Digikey, "FT24C04A-UDR-B" ( Part-No: 1219-1046-ND ) should do the job.
KenLayton do you have have found all the other components? Would be great if you could provide a 'US shopping card' which I can place on lisy80.com

Nop, no separate power supply needed, it gets 5V from the Gottlieb power supply board.

As mentioned in my first post:

At the moment I decided not to publish the PIC source code nor the pcb design. Main reason is that I do want to prevent that someone else ‘jumps on the train’ and doing profit with it and because I do want have some overview who is using LISY.

But I do sell the PCB at cost price with the 'Base Set', which means 30 Euro for the 'blank' pcb including the three programmed PICs (shipping in in Germany included.) Shipping to US would add another 16 Euros.
Meaning for a Base Set with shipping to US included it would be around 50 Dollar at the moment.

Unfortunately I do not have a (cheap) solution to get these pcb to US, so I'm still open for suggestions!

Yes, that could be a problem, it is also possible to use a 74(HCT)154, however I guess this one is outdated too.
Not sure how long this chip is available in Germany so I will think about a solution here, maybe I can make a version with a surface mounted one, however most people (including me ) do not like to solder SMD.

KenLayton jabdoa
Did a bit of research, what I can do is to replace the 4-16 decoder with two 3-8 decoders in the next HW release of the PCB
https://www.digikey.de/product-detail/de/texas-instruments/CD74HC237E/CD74HC237E-ND/1506851
This type is available in US and Germany and two 3-8 decoders are even cheaper then one 4-16 ...
Just a bit of 'rewiring' and a small change to the code of the 'Display PIC' needed

That migth be a solution, however I did that once in the past for some people here in Germany and the effort to split the parts into separate kits is quite high, meaning it's not fun to do it and also fault-prone.
But if we talk about 5-10 boards or so without having me to do the split, I can do the order and just repack, yes.

btw: At the moment I'm preparing to get in contact with my board manufacturer, maybe the assembly can be made there.
I'll let you know, but it will take some time to clarify that ...

LISY version 4.07 is released today, together with mpf version 0.50.9 it has a big improvement on the sound implementation.
In addition to control the Gottlieb soundboard you can play your own mp3 files or use the 'text-to-speech' feature.
Have a look at the new manual on http://www.lisy80.com and the LISY description on mpf website ( http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/latest/examples/lisy/index.html )
You will also find a BOM for LISY80 ready to order your components with Digikey ( LISY1 BOM will follow ASAP )

Short update: I just uploaded a new version ( v 4.09 ) of LISY image to www.lisy80.com
With latest mpf version (0.50.21) this solves a bug around switch detection when using LISY with mpf in Master Mode