Archive for the 'Pinball' Category

Poor Form

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

I listen to TOPcast, a really great pinball podcast. Clay, the host, is extremely well-informed, and his interviews with people in the industry (or who were in the industry) provide great source material for my pinball wiki project. It may be hard for some of you reading this to believe, but there is […]

Pinball Project Update

Monday, April 30th, 2007

After a pretty frustrating week, I’m pleased to report that the pinball project is at a really good point. Last weekend I started with high hopes, assembling the power supply components and mounting a flipper assembly to a cardboard box. My plan was to test the power supply by firing the flipper coil. […]

Great Success!

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Tonight I hit an important milestone in my pinball project: things are working! Since my last post I’ve learned that doing anything interesting with the parallel port is practically impossible on a Mac, and so I decided to solve that problem by employing an Arduino I/O board. Sidebar: If you have ever, ever […]

A Pinball Project

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

Tonight I took the plunge and ordered two pieces of hardware: Power Driver Board for use with the PINMAME-HW project from AC Game Systems. Allows a PC to control up to 96 lamps and 32 solenoids through a parallel port. Ultimarc’s I-PAC Provides for 56 switch inputs via keyboard codes. Finding these two boards is pretty […]

The UltraPin Analogy

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

John compares UltraPin, the commercial pinball simulator, to real pinball in this GAPAS message: Pinball is to Ultrapin as Woman is to Inflatable Woman. The latter are more reliable, less apt to make a fool of you, and … they are “easier than the real thing”. Also, putting a new table on Ultrapin […]