[HN Gopher] A man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines...
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A man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive
Author : dangle1
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-01-06 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Fascinating article, I love that this man is
| able to keep a niche (but valuable) business like this going.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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!
| MrMcCall wrote:
| 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.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| 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.
| relwin wrote:
| Replacing a solenoid with a servo seems simple until you
| realize pinball machines eat servos in a few months of use.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The amount of homebrew games has been growing year after
| year, and the results are getting pretty impressive.
|
| Here's a review of what showed up at Pinball Expo 2024:
| https://pinballexpo.com/homebrew/
| exhilaration wrote:
| Related - Technology Connections has several videos about old
| pinball machines that showcase how incredibly complex they are,
| here's the first video:
|
| Old pinball machines are amazingly complex
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg
| DrillShopper wrote:
| 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.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| avgDev wrote:
| 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?
| bunderbunder wrote:
| 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.
| ifyouwantto wrote:
| 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.
| kleiba wrote:
| 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.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.pacificpinball.org/
| nickzelei wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dghughes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I only enjoy playing the mechanical ones. All the noises,
| clanking, ka-chunking they make is where the fun is.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The tiny spark when the contacts open slowly erode the
| contact surface away.
| eddyfromtheblok wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-01-06 23:02 UTC)