I have! I actually shot that video and also dumped the ROMs for the PinMAME guys.

Brian Smith coded a nice emulation of the game in Visual Pinball. It's a very cool game and I've brought it out to a few Orange County Pinball League meetings. If you're heading up to PPE, they usually have one out for play near the Pinball Revival booth.

Yeah, I played it at PPE last year...what a trippy cool little device!

Not many. It was intended to be a bartop game. Micropin contracted out a company in Pasadena to design/build them and the story I heard was that they never went to production and Micropin didn't pay their bills. The previous owner was an employee who purchased it from the company about 20 years ago at a company auction. He didn't work on the project and joined the company later. They were clearing them out and it sounded like only a few were complete. I think this particular game was an earlier pre-production model. The playfield, cabinet, and hardware are a little different than the pictures on IPDB.

I only know of 4 still in existence... this one, the one at PPE, and Larry DeMar and Mark Clayton also each own one.

That looks amazing. It almost looks like it could be a modular design, due to the repetition of the parts. Can you imagine that design concept as the base design for a home, modular, mini pinball kit?

I played it at the 1979 or 1980 AMOA show at the then Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. The display had eight or ten set up with external coin mechs (similar to kiddie ride coin mechs). The booth was in the fourth room with lower ceilings I recall right across the aisle from the Gottlieb booth. Interestingly, the booth was for Elcon Industries of Royal Oak, Michigan who was going to be the exclusive distributor of the Micropin.

I liked it because the flippers were powerful for their size and the fact that they were stainless steel wireforms was a curiousity. The biggest selling feature was that it was the first maintenance free pinball machine. No rubber rings to crumble and dirty up the playfield, Sealed playfield area so no dust could enter, Solid State and no contacts or switches on the playfield. A great concept. Unlit (no general illumination)playfield IIRC. Featured LED technology!

Up to this point, Elcon was known for making knockoff video games including a knock off Space Invaders, Pac Ma...., I mean Gobbler and Donkey Ko..., I mean Crazy Kong video games. I swore that the Micropin was imported. Somewhere I have a brochure for Micropin buried. I thought it said Germany and Elcon rubber stamped their name on the brochure. I could be wrong.

_{Post edited by MrBally : Classified.}

NEAT! This is a very cool idea....fun and functional.

I was lucky enough to get hardcopy schematics from the engineer who owned the game. I provided electronic versions to IPDB. The name of the company on the schematics is "Technology Marketing Inc" and the schematics were drawn in 1977. These schematics match the hardware for the game in the video above, but the hardware for (what I think is) the production version is different. Larry DeMar's game used larger ROM chips and might have used a different processor. It's possible another company designed a later production version that was demonstrated at AMOA.

The retro-future look is very cool. Like something you'd see in a Gil Gerard Buck Rogers episode.

What the heck? That thing looks so boring. I snoozed watching half the video.

It's 1977 technology built during the conversion from EM to solid state games. Whether or not you think it's fun by today's standards, from an engineering standpoint it's pretty badass even today and differs greatly from the mainstream EM and SS platforms.

Besides having no rubber or plastic bumpers, it uses simple rotary and linear solenoids with eddy switches. There aren't any plungers and links, or mechanical switches to wear out. The bumpers are all mounted to rods that pass through the center of a linear solenoid and end in a metal disk that hovers over an eddy switch sensor. When the bumper is hit, the bumper tilts the disk away from the sensor. The solenoid then fires and brings the rod back to center.

The cups and flippers are all rotary solenoids that rotate when energized. The scoring and lamps are all low voltage LEDs. The whole thing was designed for minimum physical wear and maintenance.

What an interesting device indeed thanks for posting the video Kwiki. Cool story as well thanks for breaking it down for us Dmod.

Call outs meh
art package meh
theme meh

not enough toys on PF

Just joking interesting for what it is but just not cool enough for me to seek one out. IMO