On the outside, it's built exactly like a real arcade pinball machine, with the same overall dimensions and all of the standard pinball cabinet hardware.Ī few small companies build and sell complete, finished virtual pinball machines, but I think it's more fun as a DIY project.
That's a picture of my own machine to the right. The cabinet has all of the usual buttons, too, so it not only looks like the real thing, but plays like it too. A computer is hidden inside the cabinet, running pinball emulation software that displays a life-sized playfield on the main TV.
A third smaller monitor can serve as the "DMD" (the Dot Matrix Display used for scoring on newer machines), or you can even install a real pinball plasma DMD. A TV monitor goes in place of the pinball playfield, and a second TV goes in the backbox to serve as the "backglass" display.
In case you haven't heard of the concept before, a "virtual pinball machine" is basically a video pinball simulator that's built into a real pinball machine body. (You can find the old version 1 software here.) Pinscape is software for the KL25Z that turns the board into a full-featured I/O controller for virtual pinball, with support for accelerometer-based nudging, a real plunger, button inputs, and feedback device control. This is Version 2 of the Pinscape Controller, an I/O controller for virtual pinball machines.