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Arcade

Mini Virtual Pinball Cabinet

While smoking some meat in the drum smoker, I had some time to kill, so I decided to build a smaller desktop virtual pinball cabinet. Hopefully one that would be portable, but still big enough to provide a similar experience to a full size cabinet. The base cabinet was cut and monitors fitted during this time, the rest was done over the following few weekends. Similar to the other one I built, this too would be mainly build from recycled/cheap parts: The laptop inside has a smashed screen and no battery, which would have other wise been thrown out, but fine for this build. The backglass is an old LCD (unknown origin). The playfield monitor was a cheap purchase from a swapmeet (<$10). The arcade buttons are the last left over arcade buttons from several… Read More »Mini Virtual Pinball Cabinet

Virtual Pinball Machine

Virtual pinball tables consist of the same basic elements as regular pinball machines with a few replacements; The playfield and backglass are replaced with monitors and controlled by a PC. The buttons (and sometimes the plunger) are replaced by buttons and a game controller or keyboard emulator. In more advanced tables the LED dot matrix display replaced with a compatible replacement or a 3rd monitor. This previous project was the perfect test bed to see if the PC I was planning on using was good enough to run the games smoothly. The first test run was running Future Pinball with a Kinect for facial recognition.  At 25-30 FPS is was OK but there was noticeable lag at times. As this was my first and I wanted to use atleast 90% recycled parts I’ve moved away from… Read More »Virtual Pinball Machine