After more playtesting, I decided that it was too hard to catch the ball. With a game where not hitting the wrong things can be as important as hitting the right things, players need to be able to get some control. Even I was having trouble with this, and would often have the ball roll off the end of the flipper while trying to catch it, which I think is partly due to how steep my flippers are (at rest), and thus how shallow they are when raised.

When I originally designed the game I tried to copy the layout of my Alien Star, but I messed up somehow, and part of that was that I put in my flippers too steep. A while ago I picked up a spare gottlieb inlane guide, so I stuck this in my printer and took a scan:20201003153334_001.jpg

measuring that picture, I got an angle of 119 degrees (probably 120 in reality since that's a nice number...), while my layout was 126 degrees (fun fact, williams inlane guides are 125, so I somehow mistakenly made williams inlanes...). So I made a new inlane guide with a 120 degree angle:https://cad.onshape.com/documents/cf8933508c54fdc1d2e1cbec/w/8de46f8a59b2e2a9657a1015/e/ce2603cfd473c1490421177c

Installing it on the playfield made it look way more dramatic than it was, with the giant gap between it and the slingshot:
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But the actual difference in the flippers was pretty reasonable: pasted_image (resized).png

So I went ahead and adjusted the left side as well, and moved the slingshot down to compensatepasted_image (resized).png

You can see from the old lines and holes how much stuff moved... I'm ending up with a lot of holes in my playfield! When I try to make the plastic for this, I'm going to have to be careful to note which holes are 'current' so I don't use the wrong ones when reassembling.

Heh, this is so evil
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Any poker experts know better terms for any of this?

Installed a tilt bob, which had to go on the right side due to how I'd routed the wiring, etc. Even in this position I'm still going to need to trim the rod some to keep it from catching on stuff. Plus I need to earplug it! pasted_image (resized).png

With that installed, I realized I still had no way to kill power to the flippers, so I installed some relays too. Now the tilt works properly in game, and the flippers also aren't energized when there isn't an active game. pasted_image (resized).png

While opening the game to check on something, I noticed I had four pinballs piled in the front left corner of my cabinet. Occasionally, balls hit by the right outlane saver will airball over the lower left flipper/guide and fall down in there, and rather than grasping around for them I just grab another ball

So I set up an airball catcher, made from scrap lexan and attached to the existing ball guide

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In order to get the height right, I also had to put the glass back in, which was a problem since I didn't have any siderails. I dug a pair of stern side rails (from replacing with lollipop rails) out of my spare parts, and they seem to fit the williams cabinet fine. Eventually I'd like to get proper williams rails on there, but I need to get the secondary holes for the extra flipper buttons, so that's been on the backburner. Since the stern rails are narrower, they fit above the buttons fine.

My lockdown bar is also still covered in rust, so I grabbed one from my whirlwind for now, and for the first time actually had the game assembled with glass+lockdown bar. It's surprising how much of a difference this makes. The game feels much more like a 'real' game. A lot of the noise gets quieted down, which also makes the gameplay feel smoother. A big improvement, although I still need to get a coin door skin somewhere...
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With the mechanisms quieted by the glass however, it becomes much more obvious that I don't have any sound effects! I think this is going to be a big focus soon; I need to start finding (or recording) sound effects and callouts for everything. I'm not really sure how I want it to sound either. Most card themed pinball machines are EMs, and the solid state ones fall into that weird early 80s state where the only sound effects that could be generated were laser blasts and explosions (Eight Ball Deluxe always stood out to me for this). By the time sound designers were free to use any sound effects they wanted, poker themes weren't really popular. I think the only two games that'd fit that category are High Roller Casino and World Poker Tour. For better or worse, the sounds on those have never really stood out to me, to the point where I can't actually remember what they sound like to use as a reference. For a while I was tempted to stick a chime box in this game and call it done, but I'd like to try to get some actual sound effects in.

For now, I think I'm going to try to make all the sound effects be related to actual poker. Chips clinking, cards being shuffled, etc. Not a ton to work with but maybe it'll be enough. Not sure how that'll feel as a pinball game either though....

That'd be nice, but again, I have no idea what sort of music would fit. With sound effects I can at least find random sounds and stick them in, but for music I feel like you really want something custom for the game, and I can't really write music... So that's on the very bottom of the priority list. Maybe I'll just steal Flash's background sound?

Yeah, I'll have to assess my options if it gets to that. I still have the original side rails, they're just rusty. I'm going to be bringing the lockdown bar to a friend who used to polish+clean metal professionally to see if he can save it, but if not I'm going to try to paint it, and in that case I'll probably paint the original rails too, and then drill second holes into them. I want to have the rails matching the lockdown bar however it all ends up. But if I can't use the original rails, I'll have to see how the pricing on the two hole rails compares to the WPC ones

I'd assume they would, since the normal rails were the right length. But not with two buttons...

Coded another multiball. Previously I had four ways to get a multiball (getting a straight, flush, or full house, or completing a certain number of hands), but they all started the same multiball (which I've decided eventually will be the 'straight' multiball). So I need to add three more multiballs. I started with the 'number of hands' multiball, since that's probably going to be the one most commonly reached. I wanted to make it a bit more 'flail' friendly, since if you're managing to get a specific hand (and thus get that multiball), you're probably a more controlled player. For this one, I've made it so hitting any drop target builds your jackpot value, and then you can collect it by shooting the left orbit. The left orbit is a repeatable shot, since it feeds the right flipper, so for an extra challenge, I leave the jackpot lit after you collect it, until you hit any other targets, so if you're lucky you can potentially get 2-3 jackpots in a row. In practice that's really hard to do though, since there are standups on both sides of the orbit shot, and the feed to the right flipper is really fast. I also realized I didn't have any special stuff using the spinner yet, and the spinner is also a repeatable shot, so I made the spinner also light for a small percentage of the jackpot value. Even a good rip of the spinner won't be worth as much as the left orbit is, since it's an easier shot, but now you also have the fun potential of looping both shots at once, or choosing to go for the lower value, easier shot instead. With that, I also added a spin counter, so you could see what sort of value you're getting. pasted_image (resized).png

Still two more multiballs to code. I'm thinking one will be upper flipper focused, using the target and shot only hittable from each upper flipper, but that will have to wait until I get the magnet sorted out to feed the upper right flipper.

Installed a secondary power switchpasted_image (resized).png

Located a bit farther back than normal, this one only controls high voltage, so you can quickly reach under and flip it off if anything goes wrong and risks damaging components, etc.

Also ordered a door, so once that arrives I can finally mount the drawer that holds the boards and clean up/finalize some of the wiring in this area

Game is getting increasingly hard to play due to the lack of a screen, so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and try installing the plastic sheet, which means I need to strip the whole playfield. Took it out of the cab for the first time in a whilepasted_image (resized).png

In some places, I'm glad that past-me thought ahead and installed connectorspasted_image (resized).png
In other places, like the wires going to the trough mechs, I wasn't that smart, so I ended up cutting the wires, and I'll install a connector later. A few mechs I left hanging, since I didn't think to put connectors on them, and now they're wired in such a way that I can't easily add them.

Tear down went pretty quick and painless. There's not that much on top of the playfield, and all the drops have connectors so they're quick to remove.pasted_image (resized).png
The biggest pain was all the standups. They didn't get connectors either since they're so scattered, and some of them barely fit through the playfield. In a few cases I actually assembled them through the playfield to begin with, so I needed to disassemble the target again to get it out.

The paper has held up pretty well to being played on over and over.
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When I first installed it I worried that the ball would rip it up when I started flipping but there's no tears at all, even in high traffic places.

I moved all the playfield components to a spare sheet of cardboard to keep track of them:pasted_image (resized).png
I wasn't very consistent about screws, posts, etc when assembling, and in some cases I even had to do stuff like grinding down plastic posts to make them shorter, so you really can't mix and match anything, and keeping it all straight like this is really important.

Taking off the paper reveals about what I'd expected: a ton of trapped sawdust everywhere. It's been messing with the ball and getting it stuck in places it seemingly shouldn't
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It also reveals something I hadn't anticipated; the wood around every screw is slightly ripped up and standing above the playfieldpasted_image (resized).png
I'm not sure if this is just normal, or if it's caused by me screwing everything in without drilling pilot holes. Luckily these sanded down easily without affecting the finish of the wood at allpasted_image (resized).png

With the playfield all torn down, next I'll need to start cutting the plastic

Using my flatbed scanner, I scanned the whole playfield in, since this is probably my only chance to access it completely flat pasted_image (resized).png

I'm hoping that I can stitch these together and use them to update my CAD drawing to match the hand-changes I made when assembling, though I've heard mixed results about how accurate this can be...
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Then I put down my sheet of plastic, which I think is 1/32 lexan, and started marking holes for posts.pasted_image (resized).png

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The main worry with this plastic is whether it'll bubble and expand, separating from the wood, which I've seen happen when trying to make playfield protectors. This is a bit thicker though, and lexan, not PET-G; I'm hoping one of those two factors will fix that issue. To test it, the best thing I could come up with is just to heat it up for a long period of time, so I set it up with a bunch of incandescent lamps pointing right at it, for lack of any better options
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I'll leave this on all day, and see if the plastic rises up anywhere. If not, I'll proceed with cutting the rest of the holes+slots, and reassemble the game for further testing. Not sure if I'll also cut the hole for the screen at this point, or play it some with the protector first before going 'all in' and cutting a 10" hole in the playfield.

I've considered eventually allowing you to choose your poker style, but currently I'm just doing 7 card stud. Not sure why I chose that over hold-em, but they'd probably play very similar. Basically the rules are currently "play poker, win hands. get certain hands (straight, etc) or win enough hands, get a multiball". Very generic

No noticeable change in the plastic after sitting all day with the lights on it, so time to dig in. I started by just making all the holes for posts, guides, etc.pasted_image (resized).png
I've gotten pretty good at making clean holes, at least for smaller sizes, but for some reason they never seem to center well. Some I went to a bigger size, others I manually elongated by running the drill against one edge. pasted_image (resized).png
Luckily, with a new blade, making the slots and other straight lines isn't too big an issue. I score each side 3-5 times, then use a hammer to punch it out, and I get pretty clean lines (as long as I get the corners right)
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Bigger holes cause issues. Once you get to about half an inch (or even 3/8 sometimes) the bits start to chew up the plastic. Depending on how bad it is I can sometimes clean it up with a blade but it's never perfect. I wish I had a better way to do these, but no method I tried (drill, forstner bit, spade bit, etc) was perfect. It'll be fine for a whitewood, but I think I'll definitely need to get a better one of these machine cut at some point if it all works out.

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I'm finally at a point where I have most stuff cut out, enough to reassemble and playtest the game to see how everything works. I've skipped some of the guides, the drop target banks (since they're removed right now anyway), etc.

Automatic? No. I have a hammer and a large wood screw whose point I gently tap to make an indent. Then I drill a small hole, then I drill a bigger hole. I think one of those two drilling steps is drifting slightly or something

I wish I could figure out what causes the binding issues. I've seen them before when I've tried to make protectors sometimes, and it was really obvious and quick to happen. Meanwhile I've talked to other people who say they've done this with no issues.

My forstner bits always seem to have problems once they start to cut through in one place, they'll get caught on the flat area inside the edges since they don't have any more to scrape, and start ripping and flexing the plastic

I've just been holding it by hand to the scrap wood, or using another price of scrap pre drilled on top. Didn't think that a clamp would make that much difference

Reassembled and dropped it in the cab again for more testing. pasted_image (resized).png

Everything seemed to work fine. No mechs were sticking, no raising of the plastic anywhere. I left it sitting for a while with the transformer+electronics on in case that would trap any heat underneath, but nothing happened. I'm still quite suspicious, but I can't really think of any more testing I can do at this point, and the playfield does look so nice and shiny....

So I took the playfield back out, and disassembled the whole thing again. I'm getting very fast at this, but it's still a pain. One thing I'd try differently next time is the side rails. Currently they're under the plastic, but I think it'd be fine to have the plastic 1mm away from them. This'd save at least a quarter of all the screws I need to remove when taking the plastic off, and prevent the playfield from having time to sag while the rails are removed. Within a few hours of removing them there's a noticeable 1/4" dip in the middle of the playfield, which is more than I'd have expected, especially with all the drop target banks already removed... I assume my playfield wood just isn't as sturdy as what manufacturers use, but nothing I can do about that

With the plastic removed and everything stripped off, I have some updates to do that I've been putting off:
- the right controlled gate for the top lanes needs to be moved about 1/2" to the left to prevent ball hangups
- the right-most upper lane needs a new rollover drilled in line with the others, since previously it only had a 'bottom' row switch
- need to add lane guides to the upper lanes so the ball doesn't fall the wrong way
- the target under the upper left flipper needs some tweaking. The hole isn't big enough to fit it through right now, so I need to extend it, and I want to reposition the guide wire below it to give a better feed
- I've removed the upper left target (it was sort of under the ramp above the upper left flipper) since it can't be hit due to the pop bumper being replaced with a rubber (it wasn't really hittable before either), so now I can make a new guide going from the upper eject hole to the upper left flipper that doesn't have a gap in it for the target, which will hopefully improve that feed.
- widen a few holes and slots slightly since some mechs would occasionally bind a bit on the edges

Once that's out of the way, I'll move on to the fun part: cutting a 10" hole in the middle of the playfield for the LCD screen. No chances to mess up horribly here, nope...
And then I can cut another 2.5" hole for the upper magnet and finally get that installed again!

After a lot of careful measuring, it's time.pasted_image (resized).png

The fit I'm going for is very tight. I'm about 2mm from one of the drop target mounting points, and I'm going to need to relocate one of the slingshot switches slightly, move a fuse block, and make a custom mount for the magna-save, but, it should work.

Printed this magnet bracket, and cut a small stick of 3/4" iron for the core (I think this is the right metal...)pasted_image (resized).png
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20 agonizing minutes later, I have a holepasted_image (resized).png

It fits! Barely. You can see the penciled outline of the drop bank on the bottom right, and the currently floating fuse block on the bottom left. I had some room to the top (left side of the playfield) I could have moved it to if necessary, but I wanted to keep it centered between the slings/flippers if possible pasted_image (resized).png

I then mount the control board very professionallypasted_image (resized).png, and hook it up. Success!pasted_image (resized).png
Lets get a game running... pasted_image (resized).png

The viewing angles aren't the best but I think it should be okay. Will have to wait until I get it in the game for that though. The supports are a bit too thick and stick out of the playfield, so I'll need to space those or something. Not sure how I messed that up, thought I specifically made them slightly short :/

I think mine is a 9"? I got the biggest I thought I could possibly fit anywhere

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Installed the upper magnet. Needed to cut a 3" hole to fit it, but luckily that just barely left holes for the surrounding stuff that was mounted there. Right below the nearby target you can see one hole where one end of the ball guide goes, which I'm half certain is going to rip apart at some point since there's so little wood left there. Tried to design the mount to hold the magnet slightly below the surface so it won't scratch the plastic, but not sure how that'll work when the magnet is active... maybe I should cut a circle of plastic to 'float' in between them or something? I feel like overall I don't want it to be too much lower, or it may stretch the plastic or something

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Got the playfield reassembled and have been playing a bunch of test games. No buckling on the main playfield at all. I've got a slight bubble above the upper left flipper, I think I just tightened stuff down wrong though, doesn't seem to be changing. Have to be very careful no screws are rubbing against the edges of their holes, and to attach stuff in a 'wave', to make sure the plastic lies down flat. There's a slight drop in the plastic over the screen from the weight of the ball but not enough to affect its travel or anything.

Plays much faster with the plastic compared to the paper (who would have guessed?). I'm not getting occasional airballs off the center bank, which isn't great, and some balls are flying right over the eject hole. I'll have to make some air ball guards, and might also turn down the flipper strength some, since it's a bit too much in some places. If you hit the left target on the center bank from the right flipper it rockets down the left outlane too fast to see.

While reassembling I also noticed that some of the post screws are starting to strip. Some of these should definitely be machine screws, but that can wait.. for now I'm just upgrading to longer screws, since the ones I had were only going 1/4" into the wood.

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The upper magnet continues to cause me issues. Despite doing multiple tests showing that it could grab a ball from ~2.5" away with no wood in the way, it still can't pull a ball reliably off the post for some reason... It might work better if I had the post above the magnet instead of below, so it'd have more time as the ball drops, but it's probably still be sketchy. Again I wonder if having a large metal core covering this whole area would work better, or if having the magnet under just 1/32" of plastic is equivilant....

If I position the magnet at the far right, it can grab the ball 75% of the time, but it drops it too far to the right and it doesn't feed the flipper well. If I position it more to the left it feeds cleanly, but can't grab the ball. there's about 1/8" sweet spot where it mostly works, but anything can throw it off, definitely not reliable enough.

Additionally, I'm also having issues where sometimes the ball comes around the orbit so fast that it actually bends the post and gets wedged in between the post and the wood on the right, sometimes also lifting off the playfield somewhat. If I can't get the post more rigid, I'll have to abandon it since it's getting the ball suck...

The right hand bank is five targets, not four. if the diverter is closed the ball would just feed back the right inlane, but generally when not in multiball the diverter is open, allowing you to shoot behind the drops (or under the upper right flipper while you hold it up) to get back to the shooter lane.

Originally I wanted to have a rubber behind the lower 2-3 drops, so that you could shoot under the flipper, or knock down the upper drops to widen that shot and make it easier, while the lower ones would bounce as normal, but there isn't enough room to fit much behind there without interfering with the shooter lane. Same goes for the left hand bank. Would like to put two posts and a rubber to back the targets but no room. This game would play way different if it was a widebody and I had an extra inch or two to play with....

That would be a fitting name, but there's already a game with that name: https://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=649&picno=623

I didn't know it was one either and got excited for a minute, but nope. Every single name I come up with has been used on some random EM

After a few multi-hour sessions with the glass on, the plastic has finally started buckling. Worse, after I left it to cool off for a day, it's still not lying completely flat again. I assume if I stripped and repopulated the whole playfield I could fix it, temporarily, but not a permanent solution...

I've been told that this method worked successfully on some homebrew pins, but using 1/16" perspex (acrylic). When I went to my local plastics shop to buy some, they recommended I use lexan instead for this application, as it shouldn't react to heat any more than acrylic and would hold up to the pinball better, but months later when I finally unboxed the sheet and measured it, it seems to be 1/32" per my calipers. So maybe a thicker sheet would work, or maybe the material is wrong. Or maybe I'm missing something else... I don't really want to hand cut another one of these after all the effort the first one took either. Maybe I'll shell out to get one laser cut, if I can get a good cad file together...

I've also ordered a CNC router (https://www.v1engineering.com/lowrider-cnc/) that hopefully I can eventually use to cut new playfields and maybe plastic sheets (or even longer term goals, I get my own laser cutting head to attach to it), so maybe I'll wait on addressing this issue for a while. Moving back to a clearcoated playfield is always an option, it'll just add a ton more complications and steps to deal with...

Two months of no real progress on the game, but: I've got a CNC router! pasted_image (resized).png

It's... currently sitting on top of the bed in my spare bedroom, because I horribly underestimated how big it would be. But that's fine, not many guests during COVID. I haven't done any really big serious work with it yet, but it seems to work fine for my small tests I've run so far, so I don't think anything should change much.
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I did some test cuts using a straight edged router bit (not sure the correct term for this), which was recommended for cutting plastics (since it doesn't have a helix to pull up the material). With a spare bit of lexan, it didn't do too well, sorta ripping up the edges and melting them a bit, similar to the issues I had cutting my lexan by hand with a drill. I got a sheet of 1/16" acrylic and tried that, and it cut much better. Not perfect, but definitely presentable. The only issue is that acrylic has a tendency to crack and shatter randomly. The router bit hasn't caused any of that yet, but when doing a whole playfield it could potentially cause an issue. I also tried another scrap of plastic I had on hand (which I think is PET-G, but I didn't label it), and it cut super nice. I'm trying to source some PET-G sheets locally to test out but I haven't found anything so far, so I'm gonna go ahead and try the thicker acrylic first. Acrylic also is (supposedly) what 70s+80s games with plastic playfields used, and what other homebrews have, so I'm still hopeful it'll work.

But before I can cut some new stuff, I need some drawings to cut! I took my scan of the original playfield, and converted it back into a cad drawing (what a pain!). Then I got that printed out on paper at 1 scale again, tore down the playfield, and laid the paper down on the playfield to verify everything, since I wasn't sure if the scans would be "square".

Sadly you can't see through paper (it would have been amazing to get this printed on something clear but as always I'm being cheap), so I had to use a small screw to search out all the holes in the playfield again for comparisonpasted_image (resized).png

Some parts were spot onpasted_image (resized).png
Some were off, but very consistently sopasted_image (resized).png
And some things were so far off I don't know what could have happened... pasted_image (resized).png
Overall, the stitching seems to have worked pretty well, but not good enough to really be a go-to thing. In the future I'll need to be more vigilant about cutting stuff exactly matching the cad, and adjusting the cad as I go when anything diverges to prevent this.

I spend most of my day off today going through every hole again and manually adjusting my cad drawing (which the paper was printed from) to account for the discrepancies, so hopefully I'm now good to go. I'd like to avoid having to get another throwaway paper printed to verify all my changes, and I've got 3 sheets of acrylic ready to go, so I'm tempted to do a few test cuts on leftover stuff, then just get cutting and see how I do. Probably not the smartest thing to do but at some point you've gotta stop preparing and just jump in, and the cost of failure is theoretically pretty low (or it would be if I could find any reliable source of plastic locally, grr)

A lot of it comes down to what your reference points are I think. Since my first playfield was hand cut, there wasn't much that I could really rely on as being exactly matching the cad, other than the flipper locations. So I tried to reference most stuff of the centers of the nearest flipper shaft. If there wasn't one nearby, not sure how accurate I can be. Some of it may just be user error too. I banged most of the reverse CAD out over night one weekend, so maybe I just screwed up somewhere....