The next video will be it. Beginning or the end of this venture. It takes time to make a proper trailer, the actual one these record labels are going to show off. The trailer the bands will show off. The one that will be the "Pinball Eternal Official Trailer" to hopefully drive sales. I like sharing but it would be stupid to relelase a half ass stream of me playing with a static camera just for pinside. I've been pretty honest with my product along the way: so it's at the point of viability and I'm really going to crunch my price as best I can.

Technically I'm lying, because the gamplay rules+animations of the software itself is not Beta. The playfield, shots, mechs, things all work and have gone through some amount of testing. Rules and modes are going to start going in within a week or so. I have some of them in my head, just need to code them. I have some test LCD animations of zombies/demons animating and playing reactions. I have a list of callouts I'm going to record. Unknown if I will get Kataklysm lead singer to do them or not. I have a private list of people I've met and sent behind the scenes of the mechs and animations. Everyone approves. Nobody is upset(that I know of) about any possibility of price going up. Keyword: possibility. I'll do as best I can.

I have two more smaller bands for music. Gorgatron (which is cool cuz I have a mini playfield called the Torturetorium which is their song) and The Absence which have a song called Coffinized, which I have a feature where the player becomes Coffinized when they hit the coffin power up enough. I have some unique rules planned. I still have a laundry list general stuff to do and I am picking random things. Tonight I threw a ball in my homemade scoop assembly a thousand times. I'm taking a break to eat and will get my ass back out and slam that scoop thousands more times. A mix of durability testing, private playtesting for feedback, possibility to open shots a tad bit wider. Really anything. If someone has a great idea, that isn't some brand new hard to make mech, then I am all ears to them. I need this game to ship and work out of the box no issues. I still need to put in over 200 more hours of work to get this thing done. I've been working my ass off though, so those hours are going quick.

Yea if you followed, I told people that was a prototype to prove I could build some mechs and trigger them, and show the theme. Right now I think I have a really strong first product. I think it will be accepted. If I can make the schedule work and I have 3 games ready, I'll slide into Texas pinball fest. 99% chance that doesn't happen though. Far to ship or drive games and a little bit tight still. However, I'll have a local event here with multiple machines so you will see a lot of footage more than just a 2 minute trailer. I have plans.

Viper, I just don't get why you have this much energy and on my project specifically. I have nothing really additional to give you whether you want it or not.

Barrels of Fun was founded by multiple people 5 years ago. There is an Adam Savage video where the guy says he started on that topper 3 years ago. Turner, a company with 5 guys who worked 3-4 years at deeproot + released their game right after mine, still have no game done for sale after 6 years and multiple people. Videogames with 100+ employees get delayed 2 years. There is also TiltBob who has been working who knows how many hours to launch his company/first game. I'm delayed two years. NASA just delayed putting a man on the moon again for 2 years. Cut me a little slack or not. I had to learn a lot of stuff a normal pinball designer doesn't have to think about. A lot of people on pinside reached out to me about lawyers, various things, some are already in queue for the game when it ships. This thread was 100% a benefit to me. I'm humble and smart enough to know that even today, this is not a 100% in the bag done deal. I'd ask that you at least stop posting until I release the next major thing for you to actually critique. You've already critiqued the past.

I can't explain every decision I've made, why I made them. I believe in my heart this game will come out 100% in 2024. The draw for me to get up every day was to build the cheapest machine possible, to offer to people who otherwise are not able to buy pinball games. That's still my driving force. I'd again suggest, if you have not seen it: Things that go Bump in the Night Spooky Pinball. Look at where they started and where they are now.

It's a bold claim. I expected much more pushback last November honestly. Pinball is littered with some unfortunate past claims that pissed people off. When someone warrants it, I like talking shit. I wish I were ahead, but at the same time, every day you learn something more. I'm glad I didn't push a game out in 2021. Like I said, stopping the machine when it's rolling (if it ever gets rolling), is extremely hard to do. The time to perfect the platform, software, decide if I want a networked features, is literally now. Easier to eat the cost now when customers aren't demanding stuff when they actually paid.

I was able to move away from the Arduino package ($25) and get my chipset working ($3). The holdup was USB to PC communication that I resolved. That's $3 for the brains, not the entire board. I ordered a small test batch of various different boards that I received last week, and tested fine, so my hardware controller is 100% checked off. That was a non-negotiable thing I stuck to since day one since I knew the cost to build in house would be way cheaper. My system is more decoupled than a Stern node board ( additional smaller boards) and none of them are smart (Stern's node boards have microchips that talk to each other). I've been working on various lcd animations: jackpot+skillshot score tweens, zombies doing stuff, multiball animations, game over animations.

I'll just give one thing maybe to help explain where I'm at and why you haven't seen anything new:
I have a ball lock similar to foo fighters and I had to spend some time making sure it could catch the ball on time all the time. Randomness happens, balls can bounce. Sometimes it would miss. I want that to hit 100.000% of the time, so I had to work through it. Like I said before, I stopped at about 2 hours throwing a ball into a scoop and watching it spit out, but even then I still need to test scoops and all other parts a lot more before I deem it ready. The first batch of games have to work or this project could be a failure depending on what issues could come up. Showing working video clips knowing something only works 90%, just pushes you further out from the initial hype.
Galactic Tank Force had the bent bracket situation. Whether they just missed it in testing or what doesn't matter, I just personally don't want to hold the line because an external issue is found later.
The last few months have been the most consistent work block without gaps. I was working 4 years before my alpha video. I've been working after. I'll continue working. Sadly I have not had any people come in for focus testing just yet, but that is the next milestone.

I'll have to keep testing but so far it's good. A mix of buggy code that was delaying the up-post originally 60ms to wait for a separate locking pin to disengage. That was left in from when I first programmed the lock and was testing throwing the ball by hand. I then put in some firmware to allow the switch to engage the lock without telling the actual game software about the switch first. Last time I calculated USB packet ping it would around 10ms+, so that causes lag. By default only my flipper switches had direct control to fire solenoids. The switch at the back, inside the lock could angle back too far causing ball rebound to lift a tad bit which could cause it to do various things to get out of the lock and the posts being a little too far spread apart, in which the ball could Marvel Hulk and separate them a bit since there is some flex in the posts.

R&M, interesting. Been a while but don't both drop targets lock at the same time always? They have 2 optos on each side inside the lock that detect ball velocity(?). I'd think one opto being triggered on either side would trigger the lock. The additional one in front here doesn't let you lock since you have to wait to see if the ball will make it inside the loop, so my guess is they are wanting 2 optos to trigger back to back first before engaging the lock, so that one outside the lock helps? Is that shot speed dependent? From the work I've been doing I'd think you could just put one opto in the back midway between the two targets. Should have plenty of time to detect the ball and trigger the drop target lock. TNA had some pretty quick locks.
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Maybe somebody finds this interesting. I was working on bringing over all my code to the new board I created. Since those came out of the PCB factory as new designs you still have to test them. Make sure they receive data/output/power up. I was playing around making sure my opto boards are all good and registering. This all runs of the same microcontroller and codebase I used 5 years ago.

This was a painful few days of debugging. You have a list of things to do and then something always comes up. Gomez at Stern calls their opto boards "conditioning boards". They are just signal boosting boards since photo-transistors(optos) don't generate enough electrical current, so you boost with a transistor or pair of them. In the past, even going back 4 years, my code would wait a small amount of time for the opto signal to drop back to 0. If not, the following switch could be reading the old electrical value of the opto when testing the next switch. They share the same input read pin. Standup target switches that simply connect two pieces of metal didn't need that wait time.

More for engineering guys, but I decided to set the "build optimized code" setting. I wanted to see what performance I might get boosted on my hardware. Then a week later I was testing my opto boards. That setting removed my entire opto wait loop here and replaced it with a single instruction because it thought it was faster. Instead of calling wait++ 50 times, it just dropped in wait = wait + 50 and was done in a single instruction. I figured this out because I was seeing the next input switch toggle as my opto beam was toggling on/off. I was pissed and baffled. I was adding resistors thinking I needed something somewhere to drain the transistors quicker to switch off. I eventually modified the code to perform 50,000 wait++ instruction and it still read the next switch as being toggled. It also didn't affect my framerate on the hardware so I knew right away after that. It was that optimization setting from a week ago and my code is not doing any additional work. Usually there is something called loop unrolling, but I've never had this happen before where it threw my entire code intent out the door.

This was exhausting over a couple days. Here is what the code and generated instructions should look like without optimization.

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My non-TPF update: Currently working just about every day in some capacity. I've been in a 3-4 week revision with boards. I designed two separate board designs, node based and single board. Sometimes it takes getting manufacturing and plugging things in to realize you don't like where a plug goes or maybe change something to reduce wiring etc. I had a couple stupid mistakes in designs as well. So sending the design off and waiting for it to come and sometimes just not working a day or two while in shipping, sometimes you just burn out and want a day off. I'm still stuck in that perfection process and that definitely is eating up time. This is a second job. I work it at will. Losing time sucks, but I'm in no rush. There have been some bugs out of my control with how windows maintains USB data. That took 3 hours to fix that is an unintended issue. I had a pretty hard burnout day with another bug and stepped away for a few days. Wasting 8 hours over 2-3 days on stupid software issues kills you. I like to go out and play Pinball sometimes. I'm allowed to right? I only need to sell about 5 games to become profitable still. I'm about 4 weeks behind where I want to be.

I have nothing off the top of my head about the BoF team in any negative manner, but just to hit a point for people that are dead set this cannot happen. Their journey was about as long as mine it sounds like (5 years). They burned a lot of time to R&D that topper (which is very cool and fairly priced). In turn they are stuck using FAST boards, not internally controlled hardware. They are likely paying a lot for that. Those boards are not cheap. My journey was to build my own boards because I want the cheapest possible pinball product on the planet and you have to control that. My board that's outside flipping my game costs 1/15th of the sticker price of all the FAST boards I would require to assemble my game. Just being on the FAST board system (at their public sticker price, not sure what deal MFG's get) would surpass my entire bill of materials for my game. Was never an option for me to be on someone else's hardware. Was a long road understanding transistors vs mosfets, driver circtuits, learning physical datasheets of mosfets drive resistances, PCB design tools. I took a lot of time to learn how everything works knowing nothing about pinball and minimal circuit knowledge. Different business concepts, different paths. I want to be a cheap game. I can't persuade anyone beyond that. If you are a hard no that this won't happen and the price will never happen...I'm the only guy doing it and explaining how.

Seeing Ninja Eclipse get some sales is exciting. I have an original theme. I also have a plastic hard top, coin door, cabinet. I've also got some sales and tons lined up for when it launches. My email list for prospective buyers grows. They get some preferences.

+ Boards nearly done
+ Increased code logic frequency of hardware from 7kHz to 14kHz.
+ I actually was never planning to have RGB LED's but I did get my own RGB boards and have that flexibility. I 100% want to support homebrew (and potentially other pinball companies in the future) and this was a needed item for that.
+ Been a while since update can't think of any major public announcements.

My old dates were missed as someone pointed out. All I can say is when the time comes, if I collect payment on a Monday and tell you your game is shipping on Friday, then it's coming Friday. I'm a customer of pinball. I'm not a charity for R&D. Not a hobby. It's a for profit business. I worked to build a career in videogames. I used to ride a bicycle in Seattle freezing rain, no car, 1 mile a day to school. And back several times a day to get to class. My first job 20 years ago was $6.00 minimum wage. I'm making 5x what my first software job paid out of college 15 years ago. I'm of no interest to rush into a business that will definitely be stressful. Life is good right now for the first time. I'm in no interest to go full time and risk everything I've built, for a pinball company. I'm not interested in others owning a portion of what I built either by investing just to accelerate the launch by 1 year. I'm terrified of the first test customer having any issue, including shipping related issues outside my control. That would be tough after all the work invested.

This was just a song I've had in the back of my head for years now that I wanted to just record a sample of. Hang with me a little bit longer. Stay Pinball. Stay Metal.

Hmm. I'm not planning to build these all day myself. And I'm not sure people understand what winding coils means. This isn't hand wrapping, it just means I plan to have my own motors in parallel winding at the click of a button.

Maybe this could help you understand the concept. This is a guitar pickup mfg. These wind up to 14,000 wraps. Most pinball coils are 900 wraps. Imagine if at the press of a button I could wind 4 to 8 pinball coils in 60 seconds. That's a net positive. These aren't nano materials where I need a $100k fabricator, they are just wires wrapped on a spool with a $4 motor.

Just the way it has to be unfortunately. Maybe something changes to be more cost effective down the road but I'm working out what is the most cost effective way to build a pinball game. Even if a new coil manufacturer pops up tomorrow, and it would only cost me $1 more per coil, then yes I could consider that, especially if it helps my throughput. I'm flexible to do exactly what it takes to build the cheapest game.

I only own a single Stern Pro because I'm tied to pinball. It helped to look at their build, software, and helped me refine my personal understanding of game design. Outside of that I would never have bought it. For some of us pinball at current prices is not an option financially or it's tough to put a value on owning a personal game in house. This is my venture into it and what I want to take a stab at.

And I've said it once before: The company who builds Stern's coils I've called. We talked, they never even gave me a price even at 50 game volume. They also supply PinballLife but to go through them now you are paying 2 other companies labor overhead + CEOS, before I pay a higher price and then sell to you. Right now I actually cannot get coils direct unfortunately. I will hit them up again and see / see what minimum order quantity they would entertain. I've had people hit me up about patent lawyers here a year ago "This guy is the patent attorney for 3 pinball companies". Hit the guy up on LinkedIn and email. Don't respond. I know you guys are trying to give advice but sometimes shit don't get concluded until you spend 1000 hours on it. Some avenues don't work out.

I just got back from a concert. I just don't know. I posted some new boards that are out in my machine right now working. My machine has always run on my own parts and I'm figuring things out and learning.

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The fact that some dude is that pissed about a comment how I build my own coils, [removed]

I think it's genuine and we will likely talk again. I don't own any $100,000 equipment but I have coils and a working game. Reading that is guiding customers to believe my coils can't ever possibly work and my entire manufacturing dive 5 years is essentially a dead end, short of putting in $100k. I cannot concede that statement. I spoke personally about flying up to Chicago what 2 months ago? The lecture I'm basically nobody and doing shit wrong, not cool. Other people are launching pinball companies. I'm doing pretty well I think all thinks considered on a $4,000 budget.

I've been doing the work. As much as people have advice, sometimes it's about stuff I've already put 100 hours into. I currently have several ways to make various coils. None are injection molded, though I'd love to be on standard bobbins. This is an affordable model line built with whatever is the most inexpensive bill of materials I can come up with at the end of the day. I don't care who builds it. There is no blueprint for this to say I'm doing a good or bad job. I'm just doing a job.

The coil brand I saw in my Stern I did call and actually I believe they said they supply some other game companies. Maybe pinballife at the time had the same bobbin company, maybe they had nothing to do with that call. I was merely pointing to any generic supplier for references. I really don't remember who or what or honestly wtf I'm talking about in terms of PBL's coils. I talk to so many people. I really wanted to know Stern's coil suppliers cost. I spoke with that guy maybe 15 minutes. Has anyone here (other than Terry above) ever called a coil company? I do have a lot of hours put in that some people are not conceding an ounce of credit. You don't do all this shit because you are just an Arduino tinkerer making a flashy LED light for your wall. I'm below an Arduino now. I have my own hardware I control outright that runs pinball machines. I also have my own completely unique insert method.

I thought about giving away a ton of info just now just because I know I haven't publicly shown really anything in a long time. But every time I do it doesn't seem to progress anything anyway and just a time sink.

5 years ago I never touched a pinball machine. I can only learn from those willing to impart knowledge. And I have.

For a business partner, who I emailed 2 months ago about flying to see his place, shake hands with, that has known me for well over 2 years to write all that is unwarranted. The time to teach me, a naive pinball guy, be a friend, guide me to what $175,000 tooling is suggested: That time was 2 years ago. The public post is unwarranted if someone is actually trying to be a friend and impart pinball knowledge and guidance.

There is nothing factually incorrect in my statement that every video I posted runs on coils I mostly build for $3. For that much hatred generated from that statement. [Removed]

People can find me elsewhere. I'll be around. I'm leaving because of the mere fact my posts, on topic about pinball coils are being deleted. I'm not interested in being publicly whipped if I cannot defend myself.

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