Jeremy Melton

 I was randomly searching around to gather some more information on pinball machines and stumbled upon a really neat article written in 2005.

Excerpt:

“What differentiates this project from the typical emulator is that no reference is made to the original programs encoded on the MPU firmware. Instead, I employed a black box, or clean room, method based on studying their function rather than their internal structure. For me, it made sense to interpret these 66 electrical connections in terms of their purpose in a closed-loop process control model. That is, each is either input, output, part of a feedback circuit or part of the power supply. The four main divisions of the pinball machine control system are the solenoids, switch matrix, feature lamps and digital displays. I intentionally left out the digital displays for the first prototype, which is why the apparatus uses the computer monitor to show the scores”

It’s really interesting to see how he managed to interface with the existing MPU with a PC and custom IO card. He also released the code he used — PMREK. It hasn’t been updated since 2005 but I imagine it can be pretty valuable.

Link to article
Link to code

Pinball controlling pinball machine, linux, open source

First things first. Happy freakin’ new year!

Ok, enough of that jazz. Over the past month or so the nagging voice of reason has been rearing it’s head around. Can I really pull this off? I mean pinball machines are made by dozens of people — Highly experienced people at that! I half blame this on my wandering brain and half blame it on Scott @  XTCPinball for even bringing it up ;). It seems he’s having the same kind of doubts with his machine. I’m notorious for thinking of huge ideas and becoming overwhelmed by what needs to be done. I need to keep myself from thinking of the big picture right now. It’s always nice to dream but if I don’t take this one step at a time I’ll never finish.  It also helps to see that that Nuggy is still working and progressing well on Coconut Island.

 One of the things I’ve noticed with with my research is that it almost feels like there is a cloak of secrecy around the inner workings of pinball machines.  From dimensions to volts to how this and that work, it seems nobody, if they even know, wants to divulge their technical knowledge. Sure there are some kind people on RGP that would help out. But as with anyone asking too many questions I’m sure the flame would fly. Of course, I’m sure if you sifted through the RGP archives long enough you could probably have enough information to build a pinball machine, eventually. I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t sound like fun to me.

Oddly enough this got me thinking about open source software and how awesome it really is. Some of the better programs out there are open source and community based. If you can find the right people, your project can really take off and become something special. My next thought went along the lines of “How can this apply to homebrew/DIY/home made pinball machines? Oh look! A duck!”.   

There are tons of people out there with a lot of information to share. Some of it’s directly related to pinball, some of it’s might not be. Either way you think about it, there’s a big untapped pool of information that needs to be…well…tapped. Anyone can contribute to some aspect of a pinball machine — whether they know it or not. I want to harness the open source minded crowd to help with the….wait for it; Open Source Pinball ‘movement’. Ok, so it’s not a movement…yet (high hopes anyone?) If you really think about it, opening up the pinball arena to hundreds, maybe thousands of people, could even help out Stern – the last of the big guys. Fresh minds bring in new ideas! Furthermore this could open the door for some new blood that could really get pinball popular again (Coconut Island and Snow Mountain for instance).

So that’s how it kind of happend. Over the course of the next few days, maybe weeks, as time permits (so probably months ), I will be setting up a community wiki/forum/blog. The information I have collected on my own is very small in comparison to the wealth of knowledge there is out there that might not be published. I want to facilitate the information sharing. A wiki, for starters should get the ball rolling. What I’ve seen in my research is that everyone has their own idea of how to put a machine together. This is great and means that there is a bunch of information that everybody can learn from. The more information that can be put in a central location the better it will be for the start of a community.  The worst that could happen is I have a online notebook for my research.

So that’s it for now. I will post again with the progress of the machine at a later date. I need to create some schematics and get some videos made — it’s pretty exciting!

* Edit – Thanks to WikiMatrix, I’ve narrowed the wiki choice down to 5 out of some 200+ choices. Here’s a “WikiMatrix” of the features each one has. If you have any suggestions for a wiki I’d really like to hear them!

Pinball DIY, homebrew, homebrew pinball, homemade pinball, open source, open source pinball, os pinball, Pinball