Hey everyone, I'm the podcast host that has discussed every single Bally bingo ever produced (and some not!).
As announced in episode 365 of For Amusement Only, I am now in the process of writing a multi-bingo emulator to recreate every Bally and United bingo (with some surprises in store)!
Basic tenets:
1) Multiple footrail/button/dial controls
2) Real bingo cab, with real Bally hardware for ball lifter/trough/shutter, etc.
3) Custom made head (or repurposed bingo head) with LCD monitor sideways, rendering at 1280x720.
4) Swappable playfields
A) 25 hole with magic pockets
B) 25 hole with hold feature
C) 20 hole with ball return feature
... Perhaps others.
5) Jones Plugs for primary connectivity - preferably unmodified from exisiting bingo connectors on the male side, female side will have diodes, etc for switch matrix switches.
6) P3-ROC with driver board (to drive motors and coils), SW-16x3-4 and an Intel NUC to drive it all.
7) pyprocgame to drive the P3-ROC and pygame to drive graphics/sound.
8 ) Open Source for the actual code. Graphics to be released for all only if approved. My illumination layers can be released.
9) All circuits properly emulated. This includes the search and reflex circuits, as well as mixers for portioning, etc. As such, this will largely be educational for me.
I started with pyprocgameHD as I've never written anything using pygame directly, but found it a bit too limiting based on what I was trying to accomplish. I've stepped back and worked directly with pyprocgame.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to post! I'm making this thread to separate 'programming' talk from the podcast thread.
Note that I'm not really a programmer, but I've been programming since I was very young. I have the majority of the first game complete.
I'm excited to see this project move forward!