Remaking the Wizard Blocks I have was a really fun endeavor. It really stretched my talents electronically, mechanically and even on the software side to an extent.

With the way pinball machines have gone to LCDs, the cost factor isn't really that much different. If you look at my project as well as the Haunted Cruise project, it was pretty much all done by one person on the graphics side. Though, in order to finish mine, I'm going to have to delegate out the graphics work because it is NOT by forte by any means.

The electrical driver system in Pinball 2000 is still one of the nicest I've ever worked with.

Thanks for linking my thread in, jwilson !

If anyone ever has any questions about Wizard Blocks, or the Pinball 2000 system in general, I'm happy to answer them as I've pretty much had to reverse engineer the entire workings of Pinball 2000 both hardware and software wise during the course of this project (which started in 2013... ugh).

-- Jimmy

The remake is still in progress, absolutely. The software still has a long way to go, and I've been busy with a bunch of other pinball contracts (P3, TNA, Spooky, Houdini and a few others in the amusement space) that WB kinda took a backseat to those. My first commitment with pinball is to my customers.

The whitewoods I have could pretty much be completed and dropped in. One exception was the original whitewood that uses the Pinball 2000 driver system rather than a P-ROC. The wiring harnesses and software were completely different.

I didn't start putting ramps on the game until the final whitewood since it was probably the longest running process. Thankfully Matt took care of that for me.

If someone wanted to take it on their own, its a tremendous undertaking. Two others have, one of them has a fully flipping whitewood with original software (Thats @wizboy). He's insanely smart and insanely dedicated to making his game, and it turned out really well. A true recreation of the original whitewood. You need playfield CAD files as well as all of the assembly CAD files. After that, if you don't have software, you need to write your own, which means you either need to run it on the Pinball 2000 system, or use a P-ROC.

The reasons I went with P-ROC for the final whitewood:
- Its a great system and I'm very familiar with it
- The software tools I already had in place
- I could use pretty much any computer I want, and wasn't locked into the MediaGX stuff
- It cut down on my wire runs significantly as I could mount the boards locally under the playfield
- It allowed me to use RGB lamps throughout

The player never really knows the difference, but it made my life easier considering that I only had about 4 days to put software on the game from the point I got it mechanically complete to the point it was at TPF in 2017. Fun times!

Funny you ask! I dug up the code the other day and started thumbing through it and listening to the tracks... I totally forgot how much I crammed into that game. Right now its stored at a friend's place until I get my house out here in Austin. I can't fit it and Wizard Blocks into my apartment, so only one could come with

I'd love to pick it back up next year, that was just a plain fun project!