Anubis, once worshipped by millions, now slumbers.
Guarantor of respect for the dead, only the brave, or foolish would risk his wrath.
Dare you tempt The Wrath of Anubis?
Construction Blog for the one-of-a-kind pinball machine Wrath of Anubis
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The Mission Pinball Framework is a complex creature I've written about many times. Recently there has been an upgrade; version 0.80 has a major change in how graphics, and sound are implemented. Previously there was mc, the inhouse media "thing" developed by the MPF people. It worked a bit like a spreadsheet program with the sheets being strung together in…
I needed some playfield supports, and because I wanted to mount things where I did, the 'normal' ones were not a good fit. I determined to make temporary ones, initially from wood to do the job. The problem with the wood design is that it consumes a lot of space, and is difficult to work around. I also discovered that…
This is why everything takes so long. If you read the exciting 5V to 3V3 post above, you will be aware that I'm using a CNC board designed to work with an old Arduino Uno, but with a nice modern ESP32 chippie. Seriously, the various inputs and outputs on the CNC card get repurposed, so the Abort feature (used to…
You know how a simple thing leads to an endless number of tasks...
I have a CNC controller board that drives stepper motors for various playfield tasks.
I designed a little circuit board holder to use while developing the playfield. it works well and is quite neat - gives easy access to both sides of the board, and screws on as well. Next version will support horizontal mounting as well. The circuit board is held in little slots in the 'arms', and the board pops out as…
Infrared detectors traditionally suffer from interference - false triggering, and failing to trigger. This has been a common problem in pinball machines - "bloody optos" being a catchphrase I've heard many times. To overcome the interference problem, I'm using an infrared receiver that only "listens" to infrared (IR) that has a carrier frequency of 38 kHz. In simple terms, if…
The lanes at the top of Wrath of Anubis are called Serpent Lanes. This is because they will have a snake (Big Hissa) on top of them. Normally, lanes like these have slots routed in the playfield, and microswitches with a springy wire coming through that the ball presses down to indicate its passage. I don't like routing slots. I…
Pat Hand is a Williams pinball machine I restored and took to Pinfest.
The control systems use by people building commercial machines has changed. Haggis(RIP) moved away from MPF according to Aron (Pinside), using Unity for their last machine before entering liquidation. Homepin have released an open source approach using RetroPinUpgrade. Mission Pinball Framework has moved to Godot
My view is that you have not designed a thing until it has been tested, and it works.
Through my long and perilous journey to get MPF into a fit state to run a pinball machine, I learnt a few things. Many of them specific to the time and versions I used, but in general the types of things to look out for are same. And please note, you can just as easily be lucky and have everything work first time – that’s what the developers aim for, and it does happen.
The first thing you hear when you switch it on…
The Backbox is the first thing you see…
We needed a cabinet. Rescue 911 to the, um, rescue. So we needed a cabinet. Lots of research showed I could build one easily enough, except I didn’t want to build one. Building wooden things is something I can do, not something I enjoy. Repairing a set of French doors and frames was good demonstration of just how much I…
To build a pinball machine, you need parts…
“Everybody needs a Rotisserie!”
So we had lots of ideas for themes for the pinball machine. And we would start designing ,and collecting resources, untill another idea came along that was better than the last. The Frog One of the earliest game ideas. Rules can come from locations like: Some quick work on the computer gave concept art: Later designs were moderately improved: The…
The first decisions were about the playfield, the mechanisms, cabinet and computers.
To build a pinball machine, you need parts... Q) Where can I get cheap pinball parts in Australia? A) No. Even the most shoddy item with the word pinball in front of it secures a price similar to that for a three bedroom house in the heart of Sydney. I've heard many reasons for this, including the Australia Tax (shipping…
There have to be as many philosophies on designing pinball machines, as there are pinball machine designs.