Show HN: Load that 30 year old ROM and boot this Pinball Machine

playfield.dev

3 points·michu··7 comments

Just in case you are asking yourself what you see, the answer is - it's a pinball "backend" - aka the emulated CPU, ASIC, switches and more.

The Pinball playfield ("frontend") is not emulated - but you can emulate it by enable or disable switches.

Main goal is to preserve all those great games/DMD animations, explore how to crash the system and play!

I'm not a pinball guy but I guess you need to make a video or some kind of tutorial to explain a little bit, I just enabled and disabled some random switches and some random pixels blinked :)

there are already thousands of pages written for that - at https://www.ipdb.org/search.pl. there you can download the manual of each pinball game - including a description how the game works!

Probably not in the spirit of a pinball preservationalist but could this be used on an RPi to drive the mechanicals of the real thing?

Or is the electronics so much more reliable/available relative to the moving parts that it makes little difference?

that should be perfectly doable. in fact i try exactly this - running the whole machine powered by my emu and running js... i need a couple of additional stuff (handle the real time part) but i will keep you updated!

Cool. so this has a practical application.

Incredibly cool project with a really nice artistic touch as well. Great work!

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