I kind of wish someone would make a backglass, plastics, and playfield for this. Gottlieb parts are not very expensive ... You could probably build one of those three items were available ... Of course, those are not three items that are remotely easy to make .

In terms of difficulty, it's kind of the midpoint between Black Hole (very difficult) and Haunted House (not easy, but not so difficult).

I'd love to see the major pieces reproduced. I think I'd have enough Gottlieb parts to build one ... we'd just need the metal ramps cut.

He has repro plastics and the spinning disc in the backglass in stock it seems.

Obviously, the major pieces are then the backglass and the playfield.

I don't think you'd be able to get the 50 or so playfield orders to justify a run (I think 50 is typically the break even point ... and the higher the price of the playfield, the fewer people will buy it). I would so love to see it happen though. Spirit is a lot of fun and has great pinball ambiance. It does fit perfectly with Black Hole and Haunted House! . I played it for about 30 minutes at the PA Coin Op Hall of Fame ... I simply couldn't stop! . It simply has a nice array of shots and goals. The layout is quite funky for lack of better terms.

As for the backbox electronics needed, I've been toying around with an idea that could make what's required relatively inexpensive. These games are 6502 based ... I ported the Atari 2600 to an FPGA years ago using a 6502 core (tied off the interrupt, detached some address lines, wrapped it up and called it a 6507 ). The 2600 abused the 6502 to death, so I have a high level of confidence that it's cycle accurate and would work perfectly in a Gottlieb pinball machines. A cheap FPGA + some circuitry for solenoids/switches/lamps wouldn't be all that expensive.

For lamps, we could save a lot of money and power by using those 5050 LEDs (I've been toying around with adding a differential buffer to those to make them better immune to noise when configured in serial mode ... seems like it would work well). The LEDs could be driven by a couple lines from the FPGA thus making wiring *extremely* easy. For switches, instead of implementing a matrix, just make each switch connection point to point (again, this is to make wiring brain-dead easy). I'd use a pair of cheap PLDs for I/O expansion needed to make that happen. The FPGA could translate from matrix to point-to-point mode with little headaches. The FPGA could also smooth out the LEDs so that they behave more like lamps.

I've been developing FPGAs for almost two decades now ... they're pretty slick for pinball applications. The PROC uses one to hardware accelerate all of the various functions you typically need for pinball machines.

For power, basically use a 48V switching power supply and an arcade or ATX power supply for solenoid voltages (48V), FPGA voltages (3.3V), audio amp voltages (12V), and lamp voltages (5V).

Keep in mind that this wouldn't be for existing Gottlieb machines ... this would be more for a ground-up build .

However, I couldn't get serious about this w/o playfields & backglasses being available . I would *love* to see that happen though! It wouldn't kill the value of the originals and a few more people could own one of these.

Yes ... but you'd have to make the harness just like the original with those edge connectors.

Since this would be a ground-up kind of thing, I'd use something simpler for connecting stuff up since we'd have the option to use anything we'd want .

I guess you could just make adaptors for Pascal's board too. But, again, it's not even worth thinking about unless playfields and glasses would be made .

Dammit ... that trio all next to one another is as nice looking as I thought it would be ... those are three frustratingly fun games!!!