All of the CAD work, all of the playfield mechanisms, all of CNC work in world means nothing if your pinball machine doesn't have the brains to make heads or tails of it all. All the different boards that make up the boardset for a given pinball machine help to define its capabilities, quirks, and features. The different qualities of each boardset become major elements when deciding which to use for "Mission: Space Cadet".
First, A Bit of History
Early boardsets, such as the "Dash 35" from Bally, and "System 7" from Williams allowed for upwards of 40 switches on the playfield, and over 20 coils to run things such as pop bumpers. Games using these earlier platforms used displays that were only capable of displaying numbers. These were followed by "Alphanumeric" displays, capable of displaying numbers and letters. The boards in these games were a bit more capable compared to their strictly numeric predecessors.
[Alpha-]Numeric displays were the norm from the late 70's, until the early 90's, with Data East's "Checkpoint" in 1991. This new style of display used a grid of dots, at differing brightness levels, to form images. The most common resolution was 128x32 dots, games like "Checkpoint" used a half-height version (128x16). SEGA even made a few games, like "Batman Forever" that used a much larger DMD that clocked in at a whopping 192x64 dots! The boardsets for games using a DMD form the brains of many beloved titles:
Bally's "The Addams Family" and "The Twilight Zone"
Williams' "Medieval Madness" and "Monster Bash"
Data East's "Jurassic Park" and "The Who's 'Tommy' Pinball Wizard"
It wouldn't be until 2016 when the next (and current) evolution of pinball displays would see production, the LCD screen. The first machine to make use of this was Stern Pinball's "Batman '66". This innovation was made possible by the Raspberry Pi-like nature of the SPIKE™ 2 platform. The improved processing power allows video clips to be played, custom fonts to be used for UI elements, such as score, and far more.
Along with Raspberry Pi-like platforms, we also now have boardsets like P3-Roc from Multimorphic, a sort of modular DIY pinball boardset. An attached computer handles running the programming, while the modular boards handle I/O. Unlike Stern's SPIKE™ platforms, of the various flavors of WPC, P3-Roc doesn't support DMD's as a display, but can still interface with LCD panels.
What Are We To Do With This?
Taking into consideration the capabilities of each platform, including any additional things (such as cost, ease of implementation, etc.) is important to making sure any project like this has the best chance of succeeding.
As much as I would like to incorporate a proper DMD as the display for the game, the cost of a WPC boardset, and irritating problems with SEGA/Stern Whitestar boards make them undesirable. That being said, "Mission: Space Cadet" will designed to make use of Multimorphic's P3-Roc platform, and will use an LCD panel for displaying information such as scores. This means it will be using the same platform as many of the machines made by relative newcomer Spooky Pinball, and machines such as Spooky's "Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle".
The programming will be handled using the Mission Pinball Framework, with all player-facing elements designed to reflect the aesthetic of mid-90's Bally/Williams machines, 3D Pinball - Space Cadet *did* release with Windows 95, after all.
Stay tuned for more updates and sneak peeks!
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