Hello Forum! I feel like the last 15 years of pinball has been lacking a pinball design that's not based off of a hollywood license and photo-shopped pictures of actors - what happened to original themes? I decided about a year and a half ago that I would develop my own pinball machine with my own design, layout, artwork, and rule-set. I've always loved the Greek gods and ended up going with the theme “Wrath of Olympus.” The process started by first designing in digital space by creating a visual pinball table. That development has been a great success and has yielded what I find to be a very fun table to play. During the development process I purposely designed the table so that it could one day be made as a real, physical, pinball machine. Since the launch of the digital table (which can be found here, free to download for those interested: http://www.vpforums.org/ ) I have been modeling everything in 3D CAD to prepare for building it in real life.
I’m hoping this forum will help me in providing some advice on a few development options as I pursue building this in real life.
The first of which is the main controller electronics. There are a few options at my disposal (and probably a few I don’t even know about):
P-ROC: http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/index.php/products/p-roc
Pros – seems easy to work with, coding is supposed to be easier and more straight-forward, other code libraries available to help get started.
Cons – expensive.
Led Wiz with an IPAC and CPU
http://groovygamegear.com/webstore/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=239
http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html
Pros – potentially less expensive, easier to set-up
Cons – not sure how everything actually integrates and works together…
Real world example of someone who built a table using these elements:
http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=19838&hl=gyrus&st=0
Other options?
Thanks for reading – looking forward to a fun build project.