PROC

All posts tagged PROC

So.. I had a plan to do these developer diaries each week. That didn’t last more than a week. I found I was spending more time trying to record progress than actually making it. There’s also gaps where nothing actually gets done, which would make for some dull updates. So I’ve backed away from the idea of such regular updates and will do them at less regular intervals. I want to try and keep the format however. So anyway, this second entry will be covering progress from 23/11/2020 until 23/12/2020.

Monday 23/11/2020

The long play session from Sunday brought up a number of things to address with the latest build of the code. Two bugs I thought I had seen the back of came up again, although could not be reproduced 100% of the time. The first one was two balls being served up during ball save. This came up twice during the session. I’ve further tightened up the timeout config settings on the outhole and ball trough ball devices. I have also switched the ball serve for the ball save to occur on a slightly later event that occurs during the ball save process. The second bug is related to the animated star field background stopping in some cases after a second player is added to the game. To get this to occur was not easy as it’s very timing specific. The root cause is somewhere under the MPF hood and not specific to my game. I worked around this same issue last week in other areas of PINBOT 2.0 so was able resolve it using the same method. The animated star field background is an animation I rendered to an animated GIF file that MPF then plays. Currently, this animated GIF is used across many slides and shows in PINBOT 2.0. What I think is happening under the hood is the same animated GIF asset is use across multiple slides and when a slide that uses it is destroyed, it “stops” animating the GIF even though other slides that are active are still using it.
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Once again I’m well overdue for an update on my PINBOT 2.0 project. Huge steps have been made since my last post in July, so let’s get started. With the display panel completed in the last update, it’s time to get the boards installed to actually drive this 2.0 project. PINBOT has an MPU board that consists of both a CPU section and driver section for the coils. Before removing anything, all connectors were labelled.

Pinbot 2.0 Homebrew
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For quite awhile now, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing my own home brew pinball project. The idea first crossed my mind around 4 years ago, but I didn’t give it much time. Thoughts about doing it came again and again since that time, each being stronger than the last. But again I had always pushed it off as building a machine from scratch is more work than I was willing to do. It was more work than I could even get my head around. What about extending something that already exists though? Now that was something I could start getting my head around. Enter Bride of Pinbot 2.0. Owning a BoP 2.0 allowed me to see just what was possible with extending an existing game and how it all hooked up hardware wise. I was impressed with what a platform like P-ROC could do and the fact it was all reversible, means the game can be switched back to stock configuration again. I don’t have a large collection of machines that I could choose from in order to do this project, but there was one in my line up that stood out the most. Pinbot.

Pinbot 2.0 Extended Project
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