Ok, here we go. The past two weeks have been spent working through a number of smallish issues like non functioning bulbs (turned out to be a problem with me using non-ghosting LED's in place of cheap regular ones), chasing short circuits (I'm pretty certain this is a blown BR3 bridge rectifier on the rectifier board, new Rottendog board on order so in the meantime I have no 43v and hence no solenoids), and getting my first run of the code to function semi-intelligently. Here is a video of how things stand as of today, and I have to say I think it is coming together nicely!
A lot of what I enjoy about The Cave video game is the atmosphere created by the music and the entertaining stories of the seven characters that adventure through the game. So in order to bring some of this environment to the pin I've attached the "introduction" story to the attract mode followed by a looping background soundtrack . I owe a special thanks to Matt Hansen at Doublefine for providing me with some of the great soundtracks from the game which are just a pleasure to listen to while the game sits in attract mode. I've created a "story" for each character which is chosen randomly to play with each new ball. The story plays on channel 2 while the game sound effects play on channel 1. There are also a number of random sayings that play when the ball is drained with the ball save active and a series of different random sayings that play when the ball drains without the ball save. There may also be a few "moral lessons" for the player when the game ends Turn up the volume and see if you can pick out the various components of the sound calls, it's definitely one of my favorite parts of the pin.
As far as the code goes, it works about as well as I could have hoped for a first run. There are only a few hours of debug into it so far, and many many more required to smooth it out. I've tried to replicate the original Big Game code as close as possible since Big Game is such a fun game to play. The bonus countdown is really cool for this game so I tried to replicate that as best I could. Still needs some tweaking but you should get the gist of it from the video.