A couple of fellas in Australia have been building up their own pinball machine from the groupnd up, complete with custom OS.
Check out Coconut Island! They’ve made quite a great bit of progress. Rather inspiring actually.
Before we set out hacking, let us first check the lay of the land, beginning with a ten cent description of what a pinball machine is.
A Pinball Machine consists of a set of circuit boards comprising the computer and specific electronics required to drive the lights, switches, solenoids, displays and sounds. These boards are connected by many many feet of wiring through the cabinet to the playfield where all the action happens. The switches, sensors, lights and fun gadgets (like our Satellite dish) are arranged on the playfield along with inanimate objects like posts, rails and ramps to create the unique flow of the game. ROM chips on the CPU board are programmed with the rules that govern the game, detailing the cause and effect of various shots (commonly referred to as Game Rules and Shot Charts). Additional chips carry the sounds and graphics unique to the game.
We will begin by focusing on the electronics. Read on for a breakdown….
I’m going to start collecting up files and links that I reference in posts and putting them on the Resources page. I’ve added the Goldeneye Manual and copies of the Stern pinball schematics for the CPU and the I/O boards.
For those who aren’t aware, there were once over 100 pinball game manufacturers and they were slowly consolidated to just a few, with Williams and Sega being the big two survivors. Gary Stern launched Data East Pinball in 1986, which was later snapped up by Sega in 1994. Stern bought the company back in 1999 and renamed it Stern Pinball. He is now the lone surviving major pinball machine manufacturer (although there are some recent upstarts who may yet prove themselves.)
Business Week ran a great article about Stern in March of 2005.
The Point? Pinball electronics and hardware didn’t much change over the years. The boards running the early Data East games lived on through the Sega years and into the Stern years largely unchanged (with some notable exceptions.) This means that instead of straining to read the schematics posted in the back of our Goldeneye Manual (or worse, the scanned copy) we can make use of the very nice quality pdf copies posted on the Stern support site.
So thanks go to Gary Stern for nice schematics and for keeping pinball alive.
In general, if you are setting out to do something, there is a very good chance that someone has already taken a trip down that same road before you. I recommend looking for their tracks, it often helps you avoid a landmine.
A little googling and I’ve come across a few pioneers. One of particular interest is a Masters Thesis by a fellow name John Bork that hits fairly square on what we want to accomplish.
This was also written up as an article for Linux Journal which is how I came across it.
The best part about finding this work is that my heretofore unfounded hopes for a successful outcome have been (a wee bit) validated. John’s work had a different goal in mind, but it clearly demonstrates that with a little persistence, we will be able to build a new (dare I say better?) controller and leverage the existing I/O driver board of the machine. He also validates that we will be able to successfully drive the Lamp and Switch Matrices.
Don’t worry, there is still bountiful opportunity for spectacular failures along the way. This may be a fine time for everyone to pop in a DVD of Meet the Robinsons.
Because like them, no matter what, we will “Keep Moving Forward.”