I apologize if this is the wrong subforum for this, it just seemed like the best fit. This isn't a finished product (and may never be), but I did want to gauge potential interest in what I'm doing.

So, like most of you, I've seen the shiny new 2.0 conversions for games such as BOP and Funhouse. While these are cool and I'm not disparaging them, playing my local place's BOP after it was converted to 2.0 left me with conflicted feelings. While the updated display was neat, a lot of the original game's soul was gone. These games were products of a very specific time and place, and completely rewriting them from scratch loses some of the magic associated with that. I would have liked something that added some modern flair while keeping the original rules and display style intact.

This got me thinking. After playing around with PinMAME's display API for a couple nights, I was able to hook it up to Unity, and combining it with some generic art off the web allowed me to do this:

This is a stock Earthshaker ROM running with an animated color display. By reading the state of the AN display data, I can also trigger new animations (in this case, the shaking Earthshaker logo) based on the state of the game - just like a DMD. But the original rules and associated alphanumeric animations are left in place. The soul's still there!

Obviously the next step would be to do this with a physical machine, which I started doing with the help of the excellent MattG and his Bad Cats:

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My plan here is to directly read the 16 segment data being sent from the MPU with the Arduino, which in turn would send the data over COM (same as PinMAME) to be received by the display running Unity. In these pictures it's my Dell, but eventually I'm hoping to use a Windows tablet (maybe an older model Surface Pro?) that would be mounted in place of the old AN display. This would be a drop-in add on for the game; there would be (hopefully) no need to replace the MPU or any other part of of the board set.

I made it halfway there - I was able to read the digit strobe lines by attaching wires to Arduino interrupt pins, but had trouble reading the associated segment data, and received constant low signals for every segment line. I found at PinFest that this is probably because there is a propagation delay from the associated PIA, and will likely have to programmatically accommodate this in my interrupt handler (thanks @slochar!).

(See this thread for more info: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/converting-from-alpha-numeric-to-lcd)

This leaves me with these questions:

1. Would others be interested in using something like this in their games? I think I am more likely than not just going open source all of my stuff instead of trying to make a commercial product out of this, so hopefully between the Arduino, tablet and wiring/mounting hardware, the total cost would be somewhere in the ballpark of 150, which is less than the cost of most replacement led displays.

2. Are there others with experience with the system 11 (and maybe early WPC?) display setup who can assist with the wiring/Arduino stuff? Is there any reason that what I'm trying to do won't work? I'm more of a software guy than a hardware guy, though I know some basic stuff from working on my own games.

Let me know what you think, folks. I'm curious to find out if it's worth moving forward with this...

Thanks for the response everyone! I was working further with the Bad Cats today and got the Arduino sending dummy data to be displayed on my laptop. Hopefully I'll have something more substantial to show soon.

That might come in handy soon.

Ooh. Now that's an idea. Would be neat to add text animations for recognizing when balls are locked/multiball starts. Could change the looping background animation. But that would require a ROM hack, which is a complicated beast unto itself.