Table Top Virtual Pinball Machine

Hi,

For the last month or so I've been involved in arcade machines which all came about from inheriting an old 1979 Williams pinball machine that was long overdue for restoration. This is a big project as the whole machine needs to be sanded, filled, painted etc. but electrically it is in terrible condition as well. I'm currently in the process of re-doing the driver board in Altium because, as you can see below, the one in the machine is well and truly past it!

I've nearly finished the board in Altium (shown below) and will be getting it manufactured soon.

On top of this project I have also been designing and building a cocktail arcade machine for my partners 30th birthday party.

I'll go into more detail regarding these projects in future posts but today's topic is on virtual pinball machines. My partner wanted to visit a local arcade shop so she could price an arcade machine similar to the one above and whilst there I noticed the full size virtual pinball machines. I had been aware of pinball emulation but when I had looked at it many years ago, I wasn't that impressed. These new machines, however, are stunning! I was blown away by how realistic the game looked and felt. I was also blown away by the price, $7000!

Anyway this trip led me to have a look into the pc pinball emulation topic again and after a bit of effort I had a couple of tables on my pc with great results! So faced with a weekend of not much to do I decided I'd design and build my own version of the virtual pinball machine I'd seen in the shop. This one, however, would be table top size and ,for various reasons, I had to complete the project over the weekend. 

I already had 1 monitor and some arcade buttons but that was it. I knew I needed a 2nd monitor so I purchased a 25" LED  for around $150. There may have been better options available but price was a driving factor.

I won't go into the specifics of actually building the machine but I began with designing the machine in Solidworks based around the 23" monitor I already had and the new 25". Below are the different parts and an assembly drawing of the machine.

Now the design was complete the construction was simple. Just a case of cutting the required parts, drilling holes, using the nail gun to fix it together and sanding to finish. I decided to have a 3.2mm layer of black MDF on all the parts to give the machine a nicer finish. As I wanted it completed quickly, I didn't want to paint it.

The drawings above can be used as a guide to build your own but due to the varying sizes of monitors, buttons etc. you'd have to make some modifications to suit.

The Solidworks render and the actual machine are shown below.

The PC i'm using is a relatively recent and powerful i7 gaming PC. I'm not sure of the actual requirements for the software but this setup runs flawlessly on the maximum quality settings. I also had the software running comfortably on a Surface Pro i5.

There are many tutorials on how to get the software up and running but I specifically used:

• Visual Pinball 10
• Pin Mame
• Pinball X front end

There is an installer available for the Visual Pinball and Pin Mame software in one which is handy. Pinball X isn't necessarily required but its a nice frontend for your installed tables and allows quick access to them. Allow a couple of hours of software setup time as it's not all immediately obvious but the tutorials I found were generally pretty good.

And that's that. Below is a video of the machine in action. Overall I'm extremely happy with the outcome and the various friends and family I've shown it to have the same reaction I had when I saw the one in the arcade shop.

Thanks

Justin