New / Customized Games

[sellenoff]

I recalled a guy from Sweden who was trying to create a customized p2k-pinball themed around the music band Sparks and presto: I found the link to Sparks pinball 2000. Now it looks like the site haven't been updated since 2007, so maybe he gave up, I don't know, but it looks like he was able to change gfx and sound at least...

Cool thanks for sharing that. There's also a batman & robin game I've heard about somewhere that someone custom wrote.

I doubt highly that this project 'changed' the graphics, but rather he wrote a whole new program to run evertyhing, as changing the graphics to the original game code is far harder if not nearly impossible to do.

As for sound, funny, I didn't hear any in the videos..

I can't tell from the video, but it's likely he's not using the original monitor, but rather a normal computer monitor as it's far easier to implement also.

[Chuck]

He contacted me when we first announced that the emulator was working. I love his playfield. He did a really nice job.

I bet he burns a lot of bulbs out though

[Hackenbush]

In fact, I'm going to disgree with Chuck in a sense. The 3 of us never discussed this much, but to me it's obvious that our product will greatly enhance the ability to create a game from scratch.

Why? Because in addition to the emulation software, our product is aimed to make integration into the original machine as simply and plug and play as possible.

So while it's true our software won't help you make a new game from scratch as Chuck said, our product in fact will give anyone a great advantage towards achieving this, since they'll only need to write the software.

If things go well with our product, I can see us possibly working on a game development kit if time and interest allows.

Are there any resources currently on the web that explain what is required for technical development? Being a developer and pinball collector, the idea of toying around with my P2K is very exciting except I have very little understanding of the archticture, development tools etc... that would be required.

And for a new project to be developed so that Nucore could run it, I assume it would have to be developed just as if it were an original P2k machine?

[Chuck]

I don't have the link handy but clay's site gives a quick tutorial on programming the pb2k driver board. Be careful when playing with it. You will most likely burn out a bunch of lamps if you simply turn them on

[Hackenbush]

Thanks. I found this: http://www.pinrepair.com/pin2000/makep2k.htm

I don't remember reading that before...and of course I have read those guides many times while trying to fix my RFM.

Now the original P2K has a custom O/S (http://www.pinrepair.com/pin2000/xina.htm) ... I guess it would be easiest to stick with the same platform?

[Chuck]

You could. Although if all you wanted to do is created some new game using the pin2k driver board then you should just use your favorite os/development platform. C or C++ on linux would be a good start. Although nothing would stop you from using windows and C or C#,

[Hackenbush]

I was reading that Windows has too much of a delay (according to Clay) but using Windows dev tools would make life easy. Of course there is always something like a Mono/Linux combo to consider.

I'm thinking that if I develop something and I want 5 other collectors to also try it out, then having something run through NuCore would be ideal. This would reduce having to create/modify 5 new hardware set ups.

While NuCore is great as a replacement for those that need it, it could also be of interest to those that are looking to expand their currently working system with either new games, modified games or revised-rules games. Or even a Swep1 that is Jar Jar free!

I also was digging around RGP and found this old thread: http://groups.google.ca/group/rec.games ... e980dccc91

I'm just trying to absorb as much technical info right now in order to see what is really feasible with the current state of things.