Visual Pinball - Taken beyond the realm of sensible

Bloggered at

https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-digital-pinball-machine/

Lots of pics of the inside of the machine as well.

That’s funny, wumpus, you have apparently been on my regular list of blogs for a long time now. I never knew you were here on QT3 too. :)

I dug up a real world picture of Centigrade 37 which just came out on TPA and put it side by side with the DX9 and DX11 versions

Might need to turn down the light strength a tad in settings, but look how flat and dead the DX9 version looks. That’s also what the mobile versions look like, sadly.

A lot of pinball is lighting, so DX11 has a disproportionate effect.

So this new PC in the back of my car with GTX 1070 will make it all look that good eh?!

In other good news, I got the DMD working for The Pinball Arcade thanks to some enterprising coders:

Hiding the DMD altogether on the playfield for TPA a huge PITA and not worth it in my opinion. Mirroring is fine…

Whoa that’s awesome Wumpus!

The DMD was never quite right on the Virtuapin Mini.

I upgraded the 7" DMD to a 10.1" IPS model. $99 on Amazon, just required a little fitting…

It’s surprising how important a “big” DMD really is to the experience. If you don’t have one, I’d just superimpose the huge DMD on the bottom 1/4 of the second monitor, screw the backglass.

I had to cut the middle of the speaker support out, I used a nice sparkle heavy paper from the craft store to be the cover with some judicious Xacto knifing.

That looks really awesome.

Holy sheeeet y’all:

Arcooda Pinball Arcade Cabinet Mode is Available!

FarSight and Arcooda are proud to announce that cabinet support is available! Arcooda Pinball Arcade allows you to play pinball games on a full sized video pinball machine with full backglass and DMD support.

Arcooda Pinball Arcade contains 76 customized video pinball games and is offered as a Pinball Arcade Steam Add-On (cabinet support), a standalone Arcooda Pinball Arcade Software package (add to any Virtual Video Pinball machine), or as a premium software package for Arcooda Video Pinball machine.

Over 20 months in development, Arcooda Pinball Arcade software offers many advanced features including button or touchscreen play, advanced playfield angles (including 3D options), real pinball parts support (flipper coils, shaker motors), three-screen gameplay for advanced cabinet support and much more.

I contacted them to find out more detail… I don’t see this in the available Steam add-on purchases yet, the webpage says May 16th.

I’m confused. The software is only available until June 30 with a coin-op version coming after that? How does this fit withFarsight losing the license to most of their tables?

It was announced in a weird oblique way through Arcooda (they are Australian, making this even weirder) a while back, the news that you can potentially get it as a Steam DLC add on is very new to me.

Of course this would only apply to tables you already paid for.

Presumably Arcooda’s high end full size pinball table hardware has special licensing somehow, I can’t imagine a person who just paid $6,000+ for that a few months from now would be happy to hear they can’t get access to all those famous old tables that used to be in Pinball Arcade…

In case you didn’t see it, the add on for steam is 149 dollars (presumably Australian, so about 112 us.

I’d sure want to know the specifics on the software beforehand. Are they licensed to sell it outside Australia? Will they be able to update, etc?

Where did you see prices on the tables?

I don’t see it. Where are you seeing it?

They got back to me

We plan to have announcements on price and all details for our cabinets by 1st week of June. However, purchase in the way of software must be purchased before the 30th June as we will no longer have the rights to the Williams/Bally licenses after this date. On-line ordering can be done on 16th May. Cost of Unlock code is $149usd and Arcooda software is $499usd.

  • Cabinet Support Unlock Key (starts shipping approximately 30th May, or earlier)
  • Standalone Generic 76 Game Software Kit (starts shipping approximately 30th June)
  • Standalone Arcooda Cabinet 76 Game Software Kit (starts shipping approximately 30th June)

It is available for purchase now. $149 for cabinet support (Steam Key) for the Steam version, and if you don’t already own the tables, $499.99 for the 76 tables in cabinet mode exclusively.

I went ahead and purchased because I’d love non-ghetto-hacked-to-shit cabinet support for Pinball Arcade.

FarSight has been working on custom software with Arcooda, makers of video pinball cabinets. This is the cabinet mode many have been clamoring for, but it’s no mere camera angle port. Unfortunately the announcement of the loss of the WMS license has put a huge kink in Arcooda’s plans, mainly that the entirety of the TPA catalog wasn’t finished in time as well as the fact there’s the very shortened window this will be available until.

Visit https://www.arcoodapinballarcade.com/ for complete details and purchasing.

76 tables have been given the cabinet mode treatment, that includes backglass and DMD functionality. New lighting and graphical tweaks also are featured, as well as taking advantage of the ability to have solenoids and shakers function in a cabinet.

The good news is that Arcooda is no longer making this exclusive to their cabinet. You can buy the standalone, offline version of the software for play on any cabinet. If you buy the Arcooda Cabinet version, you also get touch screen functionality, digital tilt, and perhaps the coolest feature of all, 3D without glasses when used with a Kinect camera for head tracking.

The bad news is this is only available until June 30th, and it doesn’t come cheap. If you already own the Steam version of the game, you’ll only be paying for the Arcooda key. I believe this will be $149. You can also purchase the offline Pro Mode version that includes the entirety of TPA plus the Arcooda key for $499, for those that haven’t purchased any of the game yet. Advantage here is it doesn’t require a FarSight login. I’m not 100% on these prices as I can’t verify what I heard, check with Arcooda first.

For more info and a look at what the games in action look like, watch these videos…

And the official FAQ

https://www.arcoodapinballarcade.com/faq/

nice

Well, I can report this works perfectly on my pincab. Exactly like you’d expect:

  • provide coordinates of main playfield (monitor 1)
  • provide coordinates of backglass (monitor 2)
  • provide coordinates of DMD (monitor 3)

And boom-bam, all done, it “just works”.

You will have to enter the unlock key in the Pinball Arcade cabinet mode executable once you launch the game. It phones home to make sure the code is valid. I unlocked it just for testing on my desktop PC (which is in no way set up as an actual pincab, I just wanted to see if it worked at all), and then on my real pincab, and had no issues.

  • It’s not just a static bitmap image of the backglass; the backglass is dynamic now if it was in the game, some of them have relevant lights for scoring and game indicators and whatnot. Plus Banzai Run which has a playable backglass, though I don’t think they got that one set up in time.

  • The DMD is also remapped to the LCD scores on early digital tables, and even the old timey rotating number wheels score for older mechanical tables, so the table scores will always show in the DMD screen which is a nice touch.

  • As far as the playfield goes, they even set up a proper direct overhead camera view for each table, which is kinda hard to do manually and IMO looks a bit weird… but a lot of cab owners like as it maximizes the playfield to the vertical monitor. Cycle playfield camera views in game by pressing C, and it remembers your last view choice.

They did a fair bit of work here, this is a legitimate cabinet mode, and IMO not a bad deal for $150 if you can get all the licensed tables you need before June 30…

I definitely won’t miss the two hacked up hack executables I had to run independently to get rudimentary backglass and DMD support with Pinball Arcade prior to this!

Also this kinda blows my mind (requires Kinect)

That is, and I don’t use this term lightly, mega-rad.

Whoa cool!!!