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It’s a Pinball Thread. There has to be a Twist!

Becksworth

Becksworth

Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
Somewhere between television and meatspace games lies Pinball. I’m going to err on this forum since most pinball games nowadays are digital representations of the Pinball tables of yore. Discuss pinball (both real and vidya game forms) here.

Anyway, I was in a pinball mood, so I went looking on the eShop and saw that Zacharia had its tables 60% off this week and bought a few. Being a Yankee, I’m largely unfamiliar with Zacharia (were the physical tables ever distributed in the U.S.?), so I don’t know what to expect.
 
Before the pandemic shut them down, we used to have an amazing pinball spot here in NYC (called, appropriately, Modern Pinball NYC). The owner wanted it to be a pinball museum as much as an arcade, so they'd have machines from all over pinball's history. If you were interested in how a particular machine worked, they'd open it up and show you. Or if you just wanted to play, you simply paid your entry fee and played as much as you wanted. No quarters needed, no time limits. I really hope they're able to reopen someday soon.
 
Finally got a chance to try the Zacharia tables I bought out. So far they seem more like Gottlieb style tables over the Williams/Bally tables and more modern stuff inspired by them, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The Zacharia app though seems a little inferior to Pinball FX 3 or Pinball Arcade though, as I experienced some stuttering occasionally on tables, and the ui was a bit messy. The HD rumble was unexpectedly good though, so I might need to go back to the other two to compare them.
 
Where I live, we have a local Pinball Museum. They've got mostly older tables, but also a few of the more modern ones. A couple years ago when i was there on a whim, the owner showed up and challenged anyone there to a score competition on one of the 4 oldest tables. It took me an hour, but I did finally top his high score and won a poster.

My wife really enjoys pinball in digital format and plays weekly tournaments on a discord group. She's probably better than me at pinball most days, but the folks she plays against are absolutely amazing players that can record scores every week that I might get lucky and be able to get close to once or twice in a long while of playing. apparently these folks used to get together and play in person, but had shifted to the digital format because of the pandemic. My wife says they are mostly older gentlemen and that they had never used discord before the pandemic forced them to.

I'd like to heard what tables people really like. I like Medieval Madness a lot. I like Funhouse too (my wife and I like to shout some of Rudy's lines at our dogs)
 
I don't have a lot of pinball experience, but I remember getting halfway decent at High Speed because there was one in my college dorm lounge for quite a while.
 
I really enjoyed the Pinball Arcade app on iPad, and was sad that they lost the Bally/Williams license over to Zen Pinball. Pinball Arcade's physics may not have been the most accurate, but it always felt better than Zen Pinball's. I still think the Pro Pinball games had the most accurate ball physics of them all, which doesn't necessarily make them the most fun.

I like Monster Bash and Twilight Zone as the pinnacle of modern pinball, and considered getting one of the new Chicago Gaming versions of Monster Bash at home before coming to my senses. My wife and I were visiting the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas a few years back, and were talking to one of the operators who was making some tweaks to one of the machines. My wife asked if we should consider getting a table at home, and the operator said, "Do you enjoy playing Pinball, or fixing Pinball machines? If it's the former, don't get one".
 
Champion Pub is my favorite. I think I first played it at California extreme or maybe that pinball museum in Alameda but I've seen it a few places. You go through a handful of training sessions like wailing on a speed bag or jumping rope with the ball and then you fight a big dude in the middle of the table by smacking him in the face, doing different moves based on whatever ramps you use, etc. Very cool. I have the digital version on my ipad but definitely missing something without all the physical moving parts and the physics feel off because the ball pretty much immediately drops down the exact middle of the playing field every time I land a punch. If I ever buy an actual machine, it'll be that one.

Campus restaurant I worked at back in college had Revenge from Mars, Austin powers and then the first south park one and those were all pretty stellar too. I like the ones with lots of objectives.
 
Oh yeah, back before COVID we visited the Galloping Ghost arcade outside of Chicago. They had just opened up a dedicated pinball building down the street, so we briefly checked it out. They had a prototype of a Predator game that never went to full production, allegedly due to the creator never actually owning the license to begin with. It also had some technical issues, the ball would get stuck from time to time. Still cool to see a super rare thing.
predator.jpg
 
Thread Necro. Has anyone looked into virtual pinball table builds? Just curious what options there are.
 
Becksworth said:
Thread Necro. Has anyone looked into virtual pinball table builds? Just curious what options there are.
Click to expand...
Atgames has a reasonably priced one that looks really nice but apparently Zen tables are a little too laggy on it,


I’ve monkeyed a bit with VPX, but I don’t know that I’ll ever want to dedicate the space to a table. I’m fine just going to the pinball bar every now and then.
 
I have been enjoying a lot of pinball lately. Ever since I visited Seattle last month and went to a place called Ice Box Arcade, which had just a great collection of pinball, I've been wanting to play more again. Tonight I went to a local-ish place that has like 60+ machines. I've been there once before like 10 years ago. They're free play with a cover charge, and Friday is discounted to $10 so it's actually a pretty good deal if you play for like 2 hours.
 
jpfriction said:
I’ve monkeyed a bit with VPX, but I don’t know that I’ll ever want to dedicate the space to a table. I’m fine just going to the pinball bar every now and then.
Click to expand...


Hah, joke’s on you 2024 JP.

IMG-2381.jpg


I built this guy over the winter. Have about 100 tables on it, I don’t let myself add new ones in unless I spend a bit trying to learn the game so that keeps me engaged with it. Certainly not the real thing but if you aim for 120 Hz and add in extra lights and shakers it is a very good approximation.

I’ve tried the atgames one at a show and it was terrible, I’m glad I decided to build my own.
 
Oh sure.

Main disclaimer being that it wasn’t cheap, but there are places where you could certainly cut costs.

This guy has a great set of videos where he builds a budget one out of scrap plywood and then another one where spared no expense. I used him as a general guide but landed somewhere in the middle: https://youtube.com/@wayofthewrench

I bought a flatpack kit from this place for the cabinet itself. Reviews are pretty bad, but it was by far the cheapest place to get a full kit with decals already placed and I didn’t want to futz with wood working so I gave it a gamble and it worked out. I think they are just known for really shitty customer service if something does show up wrong: https://gameroomsolutions.com/

I went with three monitors, Cheapest 120 Hz 4K tv I could find for the playfield, got a good black friday deal on that. Backglass is just my old work monitor and the DMD is a $40 usb c display meant for laptop or ipad mirroring. I’d suggest going with things marketed as pc monitors rather than tvs even though the latter are cheaper because computers don’t know how to wake up tvs from a powered down state yet for some stupid reason and I wanted to be able to press a single button to power on the computer running the show and have everything else pop up.

Buttons, lights, speakers all came from this guy, he’s great. Answers questions immediately and sent me spares of things that weren’t working quite right no questions asked. https://www.clevelandsoftwaredesign.com/

I went with a surround sound feedback (SSF) kit that came with a plunger and a shaker motor. You can also put in solenoids tied to the buttons to really get good kathunks when the ball is bouncing around but that seemed like overkill (as if this whole thing isn’t excessive).

Computer was pieced together from whatever I could find for a reasonable price (getting more and more difficult). Need a decent graphics card to really turn up the textures at 4K but I actually popped a $400 mini pc in there for testing and it was perfectly fine on most of the games. There is a good all in one installer you can download for the software and forums with recreations of every table you can think of. Requires more than its share of tinkering but that’s my favorite part so no complaints here. Windows seems to be the only option for the homebrew stuff. You can run pinball fx on Steam in cabinet mode for a less piratey solution but I couldn’t get that to work right with my button controller so gave up.

Here’s how it looks in action, flashy lights warning

 
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Very cool, thanks for the breakdown! I had no idea what goes into putting something like this together.
 
Thanks! Probably had as much or more fun building as I do playing it, as is standard with these projects, but it gets turned on almost daily still so apparently I’m still having fun with it.

I find that I have the most fun with games where scores are on the low end and getting a multiball is rare and requires working through some objectives. Creature from the Black Lagoon, Gilligan’s Island and Bride of Pinbot are all good examples.

Beyond that, I like a big toy in the middle to beat up. Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, Cactus Canyon, and Champion Pub get a lot of play.
 
How good is this Pinball FX game engine? There's a decent chance I will actually play more pinball if I can do it at home. And while they don't really have the more obscure machines I tend to prefer, I can "settle" for stuff like Star Trek TNG, The Addams Family, Indiana Jones, and The Twilight Zone.
 
Well I ended up buying one of the "premium" Williams collections for it because it was going off sale literally at midnight tonight. It seems pretty accurate to me. I don't love how pulled back the camera is by default, but there are a lot of different camera settings to try.
 
Pinball FX is fine, although I don’t love all the little animations etc they add. Games seem tuned on the difficult side compared to VPX recreations in my experience, but then again so does real life pinball.

The achievements are fun and help you learn the table.
 
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