A man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive

All of that complicated electromechanical relay work replaced with a small board that can be reworked in software.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.