mrcity

I get the impression that the big manufacturers in pinball these days are still doing most things as they were done back in the '80s & '90s. Even Jersey Jack's 2014 "Wizard of Oz" still uses a switch matrix for reading sensors similar to the earliest solid state games. The biggest waste of space comes from still trying to drive devices such as pop bumpers & flippers that can't run at regular TTL voltages; everything has to be amplified up to around 60V. Not sure if anyone's made single driver / voltage booster PCBs that can be placed next to any pinball part right in its place, but most of the time, you see a large driver board with lots of transistors in the head unit and then lots of long, thick wires going to every part in the game -- modern ones even moreso than older EMs. I guess they figured wires are cheaper for manufacturing than mounting a ton of multi-purpose PCBs, but I'd argue that's more difficult to maintain. I'd love it if people would abandon that and just use regular ribbon cables or perhaps some kind of networked star/ring/line topology. I'm all in favor of doing more with software and TTL-level logic than with solenoids (which have to suck a lot of energy), especially with the advent of open-source pinball frameworks such as Mission Pinball, D3, and other frameworks that'll abstract away a lot of the tedium so all you have to worry about is the ruleset. The part you're up against is there's not (yet) an overlap of firmware developers privy to all the latest developments and people developing pinball machines. However, there are more & more really great custom cabinets people are bringing to the big shows, and someday Stern is going to be sad if they don't hire folks who stay on the cutting edge...

I currently own a couple EM pinball machines (King Pin & Yukon) and enjoy a lot of other EM pins & rifle games owned by friends locally. Cable harnesses are present in any type of game, and while cloth-wrapped wires in older machines are more susceptible to fraying, theoretically the same thing could happen in a modern machine too and lead to more than just a hot solenoid. I imagine the day will come when I have to make a custom cable harness for my custom game... ugh... I might just see if the wire harness manufacturer here locally will do it for cheap. There is something meditative about cleaning all the switch stacks and various mechanisms that you don't get with SS pins because modern SS pins are so crowded that you're spending most of your time trying to make sure that tiny screw doesn't get stuck somewhere in the wiring harness, which inevitably one or two do. Plus, EMs produce the "chings and dings" you'd expect to hear from a physical game, and present a pretty nice visceral experience. Also, as a guy who's somewhere between your average pinhead and your average vintage mini/microcomputer collector in terms of electronic skill, it's just not satisfying to replace board after board in SS games, especially when they're hard to source, reproductions are expensive, parts used are obsolete, etc. I prefer finding the root cause of the problem (which probably exists on the one you didn't replace) instead of having x number of MPUs fail on you in the span of a few months, and would rather spend a bunch of hours tracing down the failing $1.50 part than spending hundreds of dollars on a new set of boards (definitely not worth my time, other than my learning!).