I got filmed for the first episode of Hacker Lairs, showing around my house, and my Tron Pinball was featured. Thought I'd share:

yeah adding drop targets was quite a fun project with many challenges...

Ok--- Where to begin... It first required drilling holes in the playfield (eek!!!) to add the posts behind the targets so that a rubber ring can be stretched across that area to allow the ball to bounce back when the targets are down. Next, installing the actual target bank was incredibly difficult due to the space available. Aligning it properly so that the targets would not catch the edges of the playfield wood was unbelievably obnoxious. Once that was done, the electronics involved was: I tapped the optic sensors on the drop target circuit, running wires to them directly and those feeds went to a custom board that I built, which consisted of a reed relay, diode, and a basic stamp BS1 microcontroller. I also ran wires from the start button's switch drive & return to my custom board. Next, I had to write code for the microcontroller that monitored the state of the drop target optic senors as well as the start button. The way the code works is, if either the start button is pressed or all the drop targets are down, then it sends current to the reed relay which closes the circuit that goes to the Stern step-up driver board that I also installed. That step-up driver board is what supplies 50v to the drop target bank's solenoid to allow it to fire.

After all this was done, I then screamed because I noticed that the Zen feature makes it so that hitting only one target should cause a reset-- AND the pro maintains state of the targets across multi-player games. So there are two situations where the targets can get out of sync with the flashing T-R-O-N lamps, which sucks. The Zen problem is easy to fix by modifying the microcontroller code to have a variable that increments everytime the Zen switch is hit, and as long as that value is greater than zero, any number of targets down should cause a reset. However, the only way to solve the multi-player problem would be to either 1) disassemble & hack the Tron Pro code and find the memory address of the target state and zero it out on each ball (like the LE does), or 2) add some mini-solenoids to the drop target assembly that fire on and knock down the appropriate targets to make it in sync with the lamps-- this would also require circuitry to disable the connection from the targets to the game board so you don't get points when this happens... Neither of those options equate to a good time.

It was a birthday present from a friend... Kind of a joke. My company's name is Collinator Studios.

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