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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

If you're taking requests for future pinball machines, I'd love to see the 1975 Gottlieb Soccer machine. My parents had one in our basement for most of my childhood. It was broken half the time, and was hard to find a pinball mechanic to fix it, but lots of great memories.

A long shot, I'm sure, I just never really see this one get any love anymore. Volley seems pretty similar though, and looks like they're only a year apart from each other.

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiudbUYN1k

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Already implemented in Visual Pinball. It has VR support as well.

https://virtual-pinball-spreadsheet.web.app/game/x6-6z6GA/

BTW, folks like phreezie that work on the engine and the like are often not the folks that develop the tables. A lot of work goes into each side of it and they are doing it in their free time.

Yes, Volley was a nice project because one of the dev team has one at home, so we got ultra detailed assets. It was also a great use case to test Visual Scripting.

But before we dive into more table builds, we'll be focusing on the engine work.

For sure! Looking forward to you getting back to VPE now that the whole DMD thing is sorted thanks to your efforts. Do you have a rough idea of what things you'll be focusing on next? I know there was mention of a dedicated player a while back...

I'll post an update to VPU in a few weeks!

Oh great! Thanks, I'll check it out.

There's actually a pretty active part of the virtual pinball community that recreates old EM machines (Electro-Mechanical). Check out www.VPForums.com and maybe post a request there.

When authoring a virtual version of these older tables one of the challenges is getting a decent scan of the bare playfield. Fortunately, there are a lot of EM collectors who acquire and restore physical machines and they tend to be quite supportive of virtual preservation efforts - so they can be a great source for playfield scans (since they take it all apart when restoring anyway). Finding a hi-res scan or a potentially willing source for a scan will put you a good ways toward getting your virtual table made.

Also keep in mind that a virtual version is usually close but sometimes the tables have particular quirks. For example I had a stars machine. I could back the ball up into the side chute with a flipper flick for some easy points. But virtually that does not work as it relies on the elasticity of the rubber band and the weight of the ball distorting it a bit on the flipper.

Saw one guy who made VR version of these and made a physical stand which was just the plunger and buttons for him to hold onto. In VR it looked like he was playing a full thing. Tactically it felt that way too. Almost dumped 3k into that mess when I saw that before I came to my senses.

There are also large collections of them out there you can get. Most of the popular tables are recreated in some way. But in varying conditions of 'done'.

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