I grew up in the 1980's with a Pinball Wizard pinball machine in our finished basement. My parents still have it. It still works to this day when we can get replacement parts.
exhilaration 2 days ago [-]
Related - Technology Connections has several videos about old pinball machines that showcase how incredibly complex they are, here's the first video:
EVERYTHING used to be so complex. Before minicomputers all control systems mostly used relays, so a complicated AV automated system would have walls of octal base relays. We just only have the pinballs and juke machines left because all this was ripped out of industrial places since the 70s and replaced with PLCs and embedded controllers. The complexity is nanoscale and software now so harder to see.
HeyLaughingBoy 2 days ago [-]
I've posted about this before on here, but in the mid-90's I visited the group at the US Army Signal Corps that built their radio simulators. When you opened them up, there were just banks of time-delay relays and ladder logic. It was insane.
DrillShopper 2 days ago [-]
His video about the jukebox is a great example to show people when they ask how important microprocessors and microcontrollers were when they were introduced.
All of that complicated electromechanical relay work replaced with a small board that can be reworked in software.
jpm_sd 2 days ago [-]
If you ever find yourself in Alameda, California, definitely check out the Pacific Pinball Museum. It's a non-profit with a ton of playable machines dedicated to restoration and preservation.
I was just here for the first time last week. What a hoot!
I went close to closing time and there were a good amount of people but not overwhelming and was very easy to play most of what you wanted.
There were of course people not adhering to the 2 game limit and hogging the popular ones like Indiana jones, Adam’s family, etc. overall though a good experience and would recommend to anyone.
Ductapemaster 2 days ago [-]
I live in Alameda and this place is such a local gem. The owners are really genuine people too. Great place to spend some time!
They also own a whole warehouse out at Alameda Point filled with machines. I know they have provided some form of access to the public in the past, but I'm not sure what that looks like today.
avgDev 2 days ago [-]
I just want to say that I appreciate pin ball machines so much.
I used to think eventually screens will replace everything....but I get this amazing feeling from a pin ball machine. I wonder if this occurs because I'm older and grew up without touchscreens and phones?
Or do I just like knowing how much work went into building all the small components of the machine?
ifyouwantto 2 days ago [-]
Pinball machines are in an interesting middle ground where it seems like a good physics simulator should get you damn close to the real thing, with such a limited scope and size of play field. Like, convincing video pinball ought to be achievable. Nobody looks at, say, football and goes "we should be able to very closely recreate the experience of playing football as a video game" because it's plainly impossible short of a real holodeck. You can have football video games but they can't replace football, they're totally different activities. Pinball? It looks so tantalizingly close.
But the physicality's important. You play with your hips, it's not just button input or even physics limited to the explicit input interface. Hobbyists get sort-of close with lots of time, money, and clever tricks on DIY systems, but you're never going to get as many of those around and as accessible as real machines that you can go play without building one yourself. Certainly, you can't get terribly close on a general computer or gaming system that's not purpose-built for pinball as a real pinball-machine-sized object. [EDIT] I should add that these lose out on the ability of pinball machines to be different sizes—you build one of these, you're got a max size in both dimensions. You also don't get a real 3D playfield that changes depending on how you look at it, lets you peek around the sides while not playing to get better ideas of how to play or what's going on, and so on. It may be (usually is) rendered in 3D but you can't change your perspective by moving yourself around it—the screen's still flat. Even the very-best simulators are pretty far from the real thing.
There's also something magical about what people can accomplish in the designs within the constraints of having to actually move physical steel balls around. It's like modern movie making-of videos where the answer for every single thing is "a computer did it" and it's just so boring compared with when people had to hack reality to make the magic.
tiltowait 1 days ago [-]
I play video pinball (the Williams packs in PinballFX), and I own a machine (Elvira’s House of Horrors).
Video pinball is better than no pinball, but real pinball has it beat, hands-down. Cost and bulk aside (and those are big asides, yes), there is no comparison.
Sound is an underappreciated difference. Even the best simulations don’t come close to capturing the punch of a real machine.
I do wonder how close we could get if you were able to go all-out: best simulation, running in the best AR goggles (AVP?) superimposed over an empty pinball cabinet. It wouldn’t be enough (real physics differ greatly from the best simulations), but it would be real fun to see.
bunderbunder 2 days ago [-]
My pre-teen kids love pinball, too.
I think there might be something inherently attractive about a game that has relatively simple rules but a lot of depth to the gameplay. You get that in some video games like Tetris and board games like Go, but pinball adds a unique multi-sensory element. You can feel the whole machine vibrate as parts move and the ball rolls around, and you can influence the game by physically nudging and bumping the machine.
MrMcCall 2 days ago [-]
I'm curious if anyone has considered how to use modern electronic components to replace the old "copper coil"-based mechanisms and such that that fine gentleman uses to replace the old parts? I understand he is basically doing museum-grade restorations, and I fully respect that.
But I'm guessing that finding modern components with the same functionality would be cheaeper and longer-lasting, but that's just a WAG. I've watched a couple of YouTube pinball machine restoration vids and those old machines sure are filled with rat's nests of stuff.
It seems like finding modern alternatives would be a good way to keep the machines alive for longer while also making them more serviceable going forward. Plus, that would be a very practical and interesting project for group of mechanical/electrical engineers, that would likely have eventual robotics applications.
In that vein, I wonder if there are any companies that have created tech frameworks to facilitate creating old-world-style pinball machines with modern infrastructure.
toast0 2 days ago [-]
Like others have said, solenoid coils don't have a replacement. They're the state of the art for a two position actuator.
You could conceivably replace most of an ElectroMechanical machine's steppers and relays and score reels and things with a microcontroller and digital displays, and there are transitional machines that were factory produced as EM and Solid State, but I think you loose the character of the games that way. The buzzing and thunks and the lamps turning off while it computes and all that is part of the experience.
If there's no way to make the games work as they did originally, sure, make them work again by any means, but while we can make them work like they did, we should.
There's p-roc and p3-roc that offer the basics of a computer to pinball interface board (you'll need at least a solenoid driver board, too). That would probably be the basis of control for a modern enthusiast built pinball machine. Most enthusiasts are trying to build something that fits more in the Solid State era than the EM era though.
koz1000 2 days ago [-]
The amount of homebrew games has been growing year after year, and the results are getting pretty impressive.
The copper coils are usually things like solenoids, never going to replace that, we still use that tech.
In practice doing this would take restoring a pinball machine from a "build/repair it with your hands" project and turn it into a programming project where you are starting at a computer screen the whole time. You would just replace the "brain" with an arduino or raspberry pi, connect it to the existing lights and solenoids, but then you need to program it and then it becomes a different thing.
itslennysfault 2 days ago [-]
There are still companies making new pinball machines today. The mechanical parts are pretty similar to what they've always been. Energize a copper coil, make a piece of metal move. However, the "brains" have come a long way and are basically just modern computers. Also, everything is far more modular. Old pinball machines were a rats nest of wires. Modern pinball machines just use standard computer cables / connectors.
schlauerfox 2 days ago [-]
For reference: Stern is nearly the whole market, but there is Jersey Jack and Spooky Pinball, and a handful of smaller players in the market. There is an incredible private community over on pinside.com if you want a community of real people to chat about these machines.
relwin 2 days ago [-]
Replacing a solenoid with a servo seems simple until you realize pinball machines eat servos in a few months of use.
eddyfromtheblok 2 days ago [-]
Nice to see, but this is a recurring motif specific to pinball and maybe other vintage tech, where a seasoned operator has years of experience that isn't written down. Memory fades, knowledge decays, even if you have an apprentice or someone from the next generation willing to buy your business, certainly some knowledge about some vintage of technology could be lost forever.
You can pull parts out of the pinball junkyard but there are some electronic components for the early solid state era that just aren't made anymore, the proprietor of Great Plains Electronics could find updated parts from Mouser, for example, that match or exceeded the original spec, but he has retired. It's a challenging environment to keep a business like that going.
dghughes 2 days ago [-]
I worked for my uncle who had a coin-op business. We had a few old mech pinballs. They weighed a ton!
They had zillion contacts to clean I'd just spray contact cleaner and come back later. Many parts were Bakelite like cams and spinning things with contacts that would touch as things rotated. Bakelite was impossible to fix and was brittle as hell in the mid 1980s now it must be dust.
WalterBright 2 days ago [-]
I only enjoy playing the mechanical ones. All the noises, clanking, ka-chunking they make is where the fun is.
relwin 2 days ago [-]
And the smell of hot oil, trace ozone, and old wood add to the experience.
freedomben 2 days ago [-]
Same, although I don't miss the old gaslighting of lost flipper hits on poorly maintained tables (such as when pressing the flipper button doesn't sufficiently make enough contact to trigger the flipper). It kills me that they're so expensive still.
WalterBright 2 days ago [-]
The tiny spark when the contacts open slowly erode the contact surface away.
dghughes 1 days ago [-]
That was my job as a teen to fix. I had to sand away the burned on crud and then use the "bendy tool" (slotted small L shaped wrench) to adjust the contact gap.
WalterBright 1 days ago [-]
An RC combination across the points will reduce the sparking substantially.
kleiba 2 days ago [-]
I recently saw a small news bit about a local pinpall machine club/museum in a small town in Germany. Interestingly, the club member they interviewed is also the head of an AI research lab.
bigstrat2003 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for sharing! Fascinating article, I love that this man is able to keep a niche (but valuable) business like this going.
jmclnx 2 days ago [-]
Surf Champ, best game ever :)
That was our neighborhoods favorite pinball game. The owner of the shop use to keep track of high scores for all of us.
Glad to see someone trying to keep these machines going!
Rendered at 19:53:54 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
Old pinball machines are amazingly complex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg
All of that complicated electromechanical relay work replaced with a small board that can be reworked in software.
https://www.pacificpinball.org/
There were of course people not adhering to the 2 game limit and hogging the popular ones like Indiana jones, Adam’s family, etc. overall though a good experience and would recommend to anyone.
They also own a whole warehouse out at Alameda Point filled with machines. I know they have provided some form of access to the public in the past, but I'm not sure what that looks like today.
I used to think eventually screens will replace everything....but I get this amazing feeling from a pin ball machine. I wonder if this occurs because I'm older and grew up without touchscreens and phones?
Or do I just like knowing how much work went into building all the small components of the machine?
But the physicality's important. You play with your hips, it's not just button input or even physics limited to the explicit input interface. Hobbyists get sort-of close with lots of time, money, and clever tricks on DIY systems, but you're never going to get as many of those around and as accessible as real machines that you can go play without building one yourself. Certainly, you can't get terribly close on a general computer or gaming system that's not purpose-built for pinball as a real pinball-machine-sized object. [EDIT] I should add that these lose out on the ability of pinball machines to be different sizes—you build one of these, you're got a max size in both dimensions. You also don't get a real 3D playfield that changes depending on how you look at it, lets you peek around the sides while not playing to get better ideas of how to play or what's going on, and so on. It may be (usually is) rendered in 3D but you can't change your perspective by moving yourself around it—the screen's still flat. Even the very-best simulators are pretty far from the real thing.
There's also something magical about what people can accomplish in the designs within the constraints of having to actually move physical steel balls around. It's like modern movie making-of videos where the answer for every single thing is "a computer did it" and it's just so boring compared with when people had to hack reality to make the magic.
Video pinball is better than no pinball, but real pinball has it beat, hands-down. Cost and bulk aside (and those are big asides, yes), there is no comparison.
Sound is an underappreciated difference. Even the best simulations don’t come close to capturing the punch of a real machine.
I do wonder how close we could get if you were able to go all-out: best simulation, running in the best AR goggles (AVP?) superimposed over an empty pinball cabinet. It wouldn’t be enough (real physics differ greatly from the best simulations), but it would be real fun to see.
I think there might be something inherently attractive about a game that has relatively simple rules but a lot of depth to the gameplay. You get that in some video games like Tetris and board games like Go, but pinball adds a unique multi-sensory element. You can feel the whole machine vibrate as parts move and the ball rolls around, and you can influence the game by physically nudging and bumping the machine.
But I'm guessing that finding modern components with the same functionality would be cheaeper and longer-lasting, but that's just a WAG. I've watched a couple of YouTube pinball machine restoration vids and those old machines sure are filled with rat's nests of stuff.
It seems like finding modern alternatives would be a good way to keep the machines alive for longer while also making them more serviceable going forward. Plus, that would be a very practical and interesting project for group of mechanical/electrical engineers, that would likely have eventual robotics applications.
In that vein, I wonder if there are any companies that have created tech frameworks to facilitate creating old-world-style pinball machines with modern infrastructure.
You could conceivably replace most of an ElectroMechanical machine's steppers and relays and score reels and things with a microcontroller and digital displays, and there are transitional machines that were factory produced as EM and Solid State, but I think you loose the character of the games that way. The buzzing and thunks and the lamps turning off while it computes and all that is part of the experience.
If there's no way to make the games work as they did originally, sure, make them work again by any means, but while we can make them work like they did, we should.
There's p-roc and p3-roc that offer the basics of a computer to pinball interface board (you'll need at least a solenoid driver board, too). That would probably be the basis of control for a modern enthusiast built pinball machine. Most enthusiasts are trying to build something that fits more in the Solid State era than the EM era though.
Here's a review of what showed up at Pinball Expo 2024: https://pinballexpo.com/homebrew/
In practice doing this would take restoring a pinball machine from a "build/repair it with your hands" project and turn it into a programming project where you are starting at a computer screen the whole time. You would just replace the "brain" with an arduino or raspberry pi, connect it to the existing lights and solenoids, but then you need to program it and then it becomes a different thing.
They had zillion contacts to clean I'd just spray contact cleaner and come back later. Many parts were Bakelite like cams and spinning things with contacts that would touch as things rotated. Bakelite was impossible to fix and was brittle as hell in the mid 1980s now it must be dust.
That was our neighborhoods favorite pinball game. The owner of the shop use to keep track of high scores for all of us.
Glad to see someone trying to keep these machines going!