There will def. be gameplay videos when I get to that point.. not sure about live stream, but who knows - maybe I can work something out. Right now I’m aiming to to just get stuff hooked back up by sometime next week so I could possibly run mpf again and bat a few balls around, maybe work the insert lights into attract. I am def. feeling ready to switch from so much building to ‘coding’

Well it’s slow as shit putting this topside back together. I’m fixing a lot of stuff as I go along and cut a bunch of plexi clear plastics. Will be back to 3D printing soon for some items. Spent about 30h over Labor Day weekend.. I thought I would get farther lol. It always takes twice as long though.. I am anxious to get done LEDs in the inserts and see a light show at least.. that will be a nice reward.
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Right now I’m contemplating how to fix the lous tavern doors. They were going to be On springs but that failed. I’m trying to figure out a servo solution.

Interesting idea.. putting it in my back pocket for now, I have high hopes for Servos still.. we’ll see. I spent so long on those doors and the bracket for them I hate to give up now lol

Some progress. Basically back to where I left off before stripping the top for inserts, only lost a couple months lol. Working on some 3d print adjustments to ramps/subways that are not visible to the player to get this back to playable so there’s no places the ball would get lost.

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Also looking at printing drop targets as I can’t get the right size / style I want for my 5-bank. Here’s one I bought vs the extended print. Going to print another 4 and see how they hold up.
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Installed some LEDs in inserts,
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And.... milestone:
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Thanks to Wolfmarsh for building the fastpinball playground — it makes testing stuff like this really easy vs. firing up MPF which I’m holding off on. I’d like clean up a lot of wiring first.

Seeing some of 3D printed inserts lit up after months of work to make them, hand route out the holes and get them in was pretty exciting. Can’t wait to get the rest wired and build an attract light show! I’ve had a lot of ideas for them but no way to test

I’d have to say maybe more than anything so far, this really starts to make it ‘come together’. Maybe the next and only other time I will be able to say that is when I move to the final full art version far far down the road.
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thanks DeadFlip I appreciate that!!

I guess in the end it will come down to how it shoots.. although I am hoping the art/music/callouts/rules will really make it fun no matter what.. I ended up with some tight shots in places in order to pack as much as I could into this which might have been a mistake, but since I also plan to keep this forever I figure tighter shots will over time become easier to nail with practice.

Joe_Blasi -- for autolaunching during play I will turn down the coil power so that they get a slower launch in.. but yea the idea is to keep you on your toes there, I stole the idea for that and the left side kickout to inlane from the Doom homebrew.. I like to keep it FAST! When I brought this to the NW show last year, it was def. a learning curve for players to step up and launch and ball and get their hand on the flipper button real quick lol. Couple tries and you get the idea though. I am planning on rotating a lit skillshot reward with the lights in the lane (like Dialed In) with the quick feed to the flipper to shoot a lit shot. I will play around with it though to fine tune the idea.

SLCpunk2113 -- Yea, I don't have stream equipment unfortunately. I'm a little ways away from getting some more gameplay up, but when I do write some attract lightshows expect to see short youtube videos of that up and once I get into writing out some rules/code that will also def. be on a public video, if nothing else. First up I have another 30 lights or so to install/wire, and then I am going to pull all the wiring apart and route it/ziptie it cleanly becuase the rat's nest is just too much at this point and I want to have something clean to transfer over to a cabinet once I finish the rest of the 3d printing and components and move to more coding/less building.

Ok, last light photo for a bit. LEDs wired up, I think there’s around 112 FAST ones and then another 45 or so ‘GI’ ones (blue in photo). That leaves around 100 for the lower pf. Shouldn’t need that many so I’ll have some spots left fit upper lighting - in bldgs, maybe a few spotlights and such.
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Spent the weekend cleaning up after months of a mess and looking at where wiring is at. I got a proximity sensor working with detection thru the wood so I can use them in a few places. Still got some switches to wire/install before cleaning it all up with ties.

Also started stripping Dracula head decals to bondo and maybe get painted before weather turns. 9D9AD13C-C355-4846-A8D5-EC7FC73BA1BC (resized).jpeg

Wire routing hell.. I can’t wait to finish this. Here’s my rough starting point:
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I’m positive this is taking twice as long as it should because I have to work around all the existing mess as I clean it. Gradually should go faster as I zip tie and route bundles? I printed custom standoffs for the wire clips, ‘standard’ size shown here but gotta a short and extended version for where needed6D842FE8-3309-40F5-B0FC-3930B3D086E0 (resized).jpeg first time using heat set nuts, these things are game changer for 3D printed part assembly.

Working from bottom to top. I have some excess wire that’s getting coiled for now, because I’d rather have too much than too little when I move to the cab and can shorten stuff if necessary. Still a mess but got 24 switches and lighting cleaned up which took many hours somehow lol.

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Hahahaha hopefully you have a different reaction in a couple weeks. It won’t be perfect but a hell of a lot better

I never want to do this again. Trying to route wires around everything existing (the other wires) is a nightmare and super time consuming. Add in lengthening some and redoing connectors..etc.. when I got halfway thru the switches I spent probably 8 or 9 hours rerunning 8 switch wires. It doesn’t even make sense but it took forever.

Anyway, I have about 20 more drivers to run. I redid a lot of power wiring as well, and am spending time redoing the fuse board wiring so I know what’s on which fuse. Driver wiring is much easier since it’s ‘on top’ and all the switch wires are out of the way.

Aftermath of hundreds of zip ties lol ::
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Should wrap this up within the next week hopefully.

Pretty much wrapped the routing up. A few switches and drivers just have looped cable as I haven’t installed the switches yet, but at least their ready to plug and play essentially.

Before:
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After:
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Certainly not perfect but so much better

Thanks all!! I was excited to finish that and be able to flip the machine back over lol.. I haven’t yet as I was deciding if I should clean up the board..er..board where everything currently connects. Slightly pointless as I’ll be moving it all to the cab eventually but that could still be a while so..

Yes— this is exactly the plan actually! I’ve also been toying with that as a main part of the back glass - that initial image. But the skyscraper will sink into the playfield as its ‘blown up’ and it will cue the pixies.

It was fun to use pink zips.. when else would you ever use them lol.. I was surprised they existed.

Code is minimal right now but I’ve planned stuff out on paper. I mainly just set stuff up so I could ball the ball around and test lights, switches, etc. I have a lot of work to do, but it should be fun.

Coils— I’ve got 36 drivers connected to boards and another 3 to connect (need another board) plus 8 on my lower playfield. I haven’t decided on if the LEDs will work for flashers or I will need drivers for those too. Got a stepper motor to work out and a couple servos as well. This isn’t something that would ever make sense to manufacture lol

I haven’t actually wired that in because I need another driver on the 0804 board .. but I have the backup cam scheme somewhere, I’ll have to look. It’s pretty simple— the LCD gets a feed from the controller output which has dual inputs from the computer and from the drone camera as I recall. Then a 12v trigger to switch signal it’s outputting to the LCD. That 12v trigger will be on a FAST driver and then you can switch the signal anytime via MPF code based on switches being hit or whatever you want to code in.

I figure I’ll have normal output to the LCD from the computer running to show player score and duplicate some main LCD animations. Then trigger the drone cam signal when the ball goes to the basement playfield.

Killed more time rewiring the power boards.. dumb because it will all get redone again when I move to a cabinet but I couldn’t stop myself
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I fired up MPF for the first time in months and months.. still got to attract mode and nothing went up in smoke so I’m happy. I have to move some switch assignments around in the config so can’t start a game but should be able to soon.

After months of not being able to play, I was able to get all the new coils and switches into my MFP config and a game running. Felt good to get back to that point.
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Ran thru lights 1 at a time to document positions, ended up with some nice clown puke lol. Really having fun putting a gradient on the skyscraper in back
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Gotta run some 5v lines to the LED chains to support the voltage, and back to config to define all the insert lights so I can do something fun with the attract mode

Lol not sure I can pull that off but I will be using the playfield lcd to flash images of Tyler like in the film , maybe some other ‘subliminal’ messages that way.

Lol The_Pump_House — I can PM you my address for your wife to send the thank you card. My wife on the other hand was probably sick of hearing about this years ago.. she has put up with a lot of hours and weekends with me in the garage.

1 good project is good. 15... they all slow waaay down ha! I’m jumping back and forth between mod installs on other games, fight club, and painting/redoing floor in our kitchen right now. Hoping to wrap 2 of those up around the new year, so I can move on to the next 4 projects down the list lol

I’ve been playing with attract mode lighting, working thru groupings of lights and trying different stuff. Some will stay, some will change. I’m hoping to figure out light sweeps and such, but I didn’t have good luck installing the mpf monitor today and was just lucky to get back to ‘ground zero’ and running a game again.

Been a couple weeks, made some bits of progress. Never as much as I’d like, but I did complete what I really wanted to this week. Unforunately, most of the progress isn't too exciting to post about but quickly,

Spent a lot of time going back and working on 3d models, tweaking them, and doing some iterations for new switch brackets so I can install some of the last switches I have to get in. Now I have a week of printing to bang out lol.. the larger models are all 10 hrs to 2 days of printing. I'm not so great yet with knowing how to tweak the slicer settings to optimize printing time.

Here's some boring switch brackets that went in or are still being tweaked:
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The other thing I wanted to do was get MPF Monitor working, load up my play-field image and layout all the lights on it. Once that was done, I was able to get the light show creator running that Mark made and shared with the community when he did his amazing Nightmare Before xmas pin. I will still hand 'code' some shows.. which is all I did for the attract mode, but this makes it incredibly easier to do complex things like sweeps and shapes.. those would take hours to to do by hand. I made a quick show, and it's implemented when you complete the inlane/outlane C-L-U-B letters... which is the other task I wanted to figure out this week.

I took a video, but it's pretty terrible so I will wait and get a better one later. With that working, I was able to start coding shots and shot groups in so that the lights come on for the FIGHT targets, Mayhem targets, and you score points for completions of shot groups and hitting the ramps. Very basic, but it's a building block.

Finally I hooked up the mini-LCD in the playfield just to make sure it's still working. It's easier to look at it for the score to make sure code I'm adding is working correctly, than back at the laptop. I can see that I may need to 3d print the plastics to hide the GI lighting better.. all the light makes it harder to read the LCD screen.
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Here's the 'finished' attract mode for now:

Thanks Nokoro !

Finally a bit of gameplay. Didn’t hit all the shots but you can see what I’ve been working on, slowly adding sounds and lights

Waiting on the roof to print, testing the house dimensions

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Seems to fit ok.. few adjustments to make for next iteration - this should work for testing lighting though

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