# How I built a pinball machine. (My Cal Extreme 2020 quick seminar) **Source:** Dead Flip **Type:** video **Published:** 2020-08-02 **Duration:** 14m 47s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lW-tOUIgwg --- ## Analysis Jack Danger presents a comprehensive seminar at Cal Extreme 2020 documenting his journey building a custom pinball machine from concept to playable prototype. He covers the entire pipeline from layout design in Visual Pinball through CAD work in Illustrator and Fusion 360, CNC routing, programming via Mission Pinball Framework, and wiring with P-ROC boards, emphasizing the collaborative nature of the project and available resources for homebrew builders. ### Key Claims - [MEDIUM] Mission Pinball Framework created a code reformatting tool specifically to help newbies after Jack Danger spent hours debugging a single extra space in his code — _Jack describes finding one extra space that broke his entire code, then notes 'the fine folks at Mission Pinball created a tool just because I'm an idiot, to help reformat all your code'_ - [HIGH] The entire layout design process took approximately 24 hours, compared to months that professional designers typically spend — _Jack states: 'i think the whole idea for this layout was maybe 24 hours' when contrasting with how 'a designer might spend months coming up with a layout'_ - [HIGH] George Gomez provided a large box of parts to help Jack Danger prototype his machine — _Jack says: 'Later down the line I bothered George Gomez (legendary Stern designer) immensely until he threw a big box of parts at me so I could start piecing something together'_ - [HIGH] Building a homebrew pinball machine is very labor intensive and very expensive — _Jack states: 'if you're trying to build your own pinball machine this is very labor intensive and it's very expensive'_ - [MEDIUM] Having a physical homebrew pinball machine is the best resume for getting hired as a designer at a pinball company — _Jack advises: 'if you're trying to get hired as a designer at a pinball company, the best resume you can have is this... If you could show that you have a physical representation of something that you love... this is the best resume you could possibly have'_ ### Notable Quotes > "The internet would be like, Hey, I really love the bowl from Diner, or I love this orbit shot from Theater of Magic. And we'll just take all these and sort of amalgamate them into fun little new layouts" > — **Jack Danger**, early in presentation > _Explains the origin concept of the Dead Flip show that led to building a physical machine_ > "it was like wow it's one of the moments you know you just brought this thing into life it didn't exist before" > — **Jack Danger**, mid-presentation > _Emotional moment describing first successful flip test after months of design and build work_ > "The resources are out there and I'm going to help try to also compile those a little bit better... Pinball Makers website... is a great place to start and finish" > — **Jack Danger**, near end > _Primary resource recommendation for homebrew builders; indicates commitment to documenting process for others_ > "My hand was held so hard through this entire process" > — **Jack Danger**, late presentation > _Acknowledges extensive mentorship and support from Mission Pinball community for non-programmer_ > "I'm a very visual person, I'm an artist by trade, or was before pinball, and I needed that visual representation" > — **Jack Danger**, mid-presentation > _Explains why he chose Mission Pinball Framework over FAST boards—visual UI preferred over text-based coding_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Jack Danger | person | Creator of Dead Flip show and the homebrew pinball machine being documented; seminar presenter at Cal Extreme 2020 | | Scott Denisey | person | Friend who pointed Jack to Pinball Makers website, helped with CNC routing and programming using Mission Pinball Framework, provided technical mentorship throughout project | | George Gomez | person | Legendary Stern designer who provided parts box to Jack Danger for prototyping after being repeatedly asked for help | | Ed Owens | person | Electronics expert from Wisconsin who helped Jack Danger wire up the P-ROC boards and get the machine flipping | | Jerry | person | Friend who provided P-ROC/Multimorphic P3 board for the machine's control system | | Mission Pinball Framework | product | Open-source Python-based pinball programming framework used for the machine's logic and game programming; team provided extensive support to non-programmer Jack | | Visual Pinball | product | Software used to design and simulate the initial pinball layout, with exported blueprints used for physical construction | | Multimorphic P-ROC | product | Control board platform used for the homebrew machine's electronics and solenoid control | | Multimorphic P3 | product | Alternative control board platform mentioned as option for the homebrew machine | | FAST boards | product | Alternative control board platform mentioned as option but not selected for Jack's machine | | Adobe Illustrator | product | Vector-based CAD program used to retrace Visual Pinball blueprint for precise measurements and DXF/DWG export | | Fusion 360 | product | 3D CAD program used to simulate CNC router cuts and create cutting depth specifications before physical routing | | Pinball Makers | organization | Website and resource hub providing templates, CAD files, and documentation for homebrew pinball builders; primary resource recommended by Jack | | Dead Flip | organization | Show/channel created by Jack Danger that experiments with pinball layouts and themes, leading to the homebrew machine project | | Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer whose parts blueprints and hardware were used in the homebrew build; George Gomez provided support | | Cal Extreme 2020 | event | Gaming conference/expo where Jack Danger presented this seminar on homebrew pinball building | ### Topics - **Primary:** Homebrew pinball machine design and construction, Mission Pinball Framework and open-source pinball programming, CAD and CNC routing workflows for pinball playfield manufacturing, Community collaboration and mentorship in homebrew pinball - **Secondary:** Career pathways in pinball design through homebrew projects, Virtual Pinball simulation for layout prototyping, P-ROC board programming and wiring - **Mentioned:** Dead Flip show format and layout experimentation ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.85) — Jack expresses genuine enthusiasm and gratitude throughout, though acknowledges frustrations during debugging and construction. Sentiment is encouraging and supportive toward community members and resources that helped. Tone shifts from frustration during technical challenges to triumph at completion. ### Signals - **[community_signal]** Jack Danger streamed the entire homebrew build process to help educate other potential builders and documented problems solved to prevent others from facing same issues (confidence: high) — Jack states: 'all of this was streamed so that I could help other people get through this the things we figured out other people don't have to figure out anymore' - **[community_signal]** Homebrew pinball community highly collaborative with experienced members (Scott Denisey, Ed Owens, Jerry) actively mentoring newcomers with equipment and expertise (confidence: high) — Multiple instances of friends providing significant technical help, equipment, and time; Slack community providing rapid troubleshooting assistance - **[market_signal]** Building a physical homebrew pinball machine emerging as viable career entry strategy and portfolio piece for pinball design industry positions (confidence: medium) — Jack's closing advice: 'if you're trying to get hired as a designer at a pinball company, the best resume you can have is this... a physical representation of something that you love' - **[operational_signal]** Significant barrier reduction in homebrew pinball building through freely available tools (Visual Pinball, Mission Pinball Framework, Pinball Makers templates) and community documentation (confidence: high) — Jack repeatedly emphasizes Pinball Makers website, free CAD programs, and documented blueprint templates as enabling factors for non-expert builders - **[technology_signal]** Mission Pinball Framework actively improving developer experience based on real-world user feedback from non-programmer builders (confidence: high) — Code reformatting tool created specifically to help newbies after Jack's debugging experience; framework provides visual UI for artists/non-programmers --- ## Transcript What is going on Cal Extreme? Jack Danger here of Deadflip. My logo is kind of in the back there. I was asked to briefly talk about how I came about creating my own stinking pinball machine. And I gotta say, this was quite a journey and it required a lot of bit of help, as you can kind of see the autofocus sponsors there. But yeah, let's get right into it. So if you're familiar with the show, we love to experiment with layouts and themes. You know, if we're not playing, I want to just sit down at a computer, open up Photoshop, and just draw weird pinball layouts. The internet would be like, hey, I really love the bowl from Diner, or I love this orbit shot from Theater of Magic. And we'll just take all these and sort of amalgamate them into fun little new layouts that we can apply a theme to just to mess around. But we had an idea that we wanted to show how to build a pinball machine with zero knowledge, of which I had zero knowledge. So we set out to do just that, and I reached out to my good friend Scott Danesi. I was like, can you point us in any good directions? He pointed me to the Pinball Makers website, which is fantastic. If you want to build a pinball machine, definitely go check out pinballmakers.com. uh but so what we did is we sat down and we're like okay we're not going to spend too much time on any single part of this process this whole process is just to show how to execute this okay where a designer might spend months coming up with a layout i think the whole idea for this layout was maybe 24 hours. So what we did is we sat down, hopped into Photoshop, sketched up a few things, and then we moved over to Visual Pinball. So if you're not familiar with Visual Pinball, it's a piece of software that lets you recreate your own pinball tables inside an environment that has everything ready for you. Pop bumpers, slingshots, flippers, the gravity's there, and you can program it to your heart's content. You could recreate tables, you can make your own, and we created our own. So we laid out what we thought was a pretty cool layout, shot on it virtually for a minute, like, oh, this sucks, this doesn't make sense, tweaked it all. And then what we did was we printed out or we exported the blueprint of that virtual pinball machine that we made. We lined it up with some templates to make sure it is the proper size for a play field, one that would fit in this donated Iron Maiden slash Beatles slash WWE cabinet that I have. And then we went to Kinko's and printed that out. All right. Laid it on top of a piece of wood and it was perfect. We started taking cardstock and building it up three dimensionally, like building up the walls, hard cardstock with lots of blue painter's tape I have laying around here somewhere. In fact, the actual, I'm not going to show it to you. It doesn't matter. um so we started laying out with painter's tape and cardstock to actually get a 3d view a feel of what this thing's actually going to look like and uh we built on stream our own rotisserie out of some two by fours and some plumbing parts uh it was a bit of a nightmare and it worked for a while but it eventually uh snapped on us and we had to move on to uh greener pastures there but we planted our board that we made there and started dremeling out holes to fit with hardware we had laying around the studio Later down the line I bothered George Gomez immensely until he threw a big box of parts at me so I could start piecing something together. Again, just to get a feel of what it looks like. And then what we did is we took that blueprint that we had from Visual Pinball and we pulled it into illustrator uh so illustrator works in vectors and you can use it kind of like a cad program or you could use autocad if you're familiar there's a lot of free cad programs out there you can use to make sure you get everything precise if you want exact measurements of like pop bumpers slingshots and the holes that accompany that there are a lot of templates again on pinball makers because i was using stern parts i was opening up blueprints of games that You can get off the manuals and just copying those sizes, which actually worked incredibly well. We just lucked out there, I guess. So we retraced everything in Illustrator so that we had a CAD format. And then we were able to transfer that into DXF, DWG. There's those various formats in 3D that we would pull into a program called Fusion 360. and this is a 3D program that simulates what a CNC router would be doing. So cutting out all the shapes, cutting out all the inserts, you name it. You set the depths. You built this whole big 3D model in there and you could say simulate and it would show it like cutting it out. And again, I leaned heavily on Scott Denisey to help me figure this stuff out as far as like the CNC and some of the CAD stuff. In fact, there were several streams we did where we were at his house where he was using his tiny little CNC machine where he would cut half the board, take it out, spin it, put it in, cut the other half, all while drinking some beers and, you know, just talking crap. But it was a lot of fun, and I had a lot, a lot of help, and I can't stress enough how much help I had in this. Scott, when it came to programming, again, went to Scott. I was like, hey, what are we doing here? What am I doing for my electronics? How am I controlling this stuff? I don't know any of this. So there's fast boards. We went with Multimorphics P-Rock boards, P3 Rock. Jerry, a very good friend of mine, helped us out there and gave us a brain to work on here. And for programming, Scott used a skeleton game. and I decided to go with Mission Pinball just because it felt more, just from an outsider's perspective, that one, I don't know how to program, felt very, I don't know, there was more of like a UI there, right? And I'm a very visual person, I'm an artist by trade, or was before pinball, and I needed that visual representation. If I'm just looking at numbers and letters, I'm going to pull all my hair out, but we'll get to the hair pulling out part soon enough. So before we wired up anything, we took a look at what we had and we're like, let's dive into Mission Pinball, follow the tutorial and figure out how to program for this. And we went through this whole tutorial and towards the end of like getting your virtual game flipping, it wasn't working. It wasn't working. And I'm throwing stuff around the room. I'm doing all this live. I'm just like, what the heck is going on? And after hours and hours and hours of looking at my code I found that there was one extra space in a piece of my code that stopped the whole dang thing from working And because of that the fine folks at Mission Pinball created a tool just because I'm an idiot, to help reformat all your code to make sure you didn't have an extra little space or tab or something that's in there that's going to screw up your code, to help newbies, much like myself, develop games for themselves. um once we got that working then it was time to move on to wiring things up all right so we to go back to the cnc for a moment we had a lot of different boards cut we would cut something see that something wasn't working the playfield just before this we thought we were done and discovered that our inserts were too close to like some of the holes that we needed to mount like targets to and had to move everything down get a cut again uh right out of the gate i'll tell you if you're trying to build your own pinball machine this is very labor intensive and it's very expensive but just you probably know that already anyway um so it came to wiring we wanted to we had everything where we wanted it we wanted to wire this thing up and see how it flips that's where i enlisted the help of my good buddy ed owens um he lives out in the middle of wisconsin somewhere and i remember driving in the dead of winter bringing my play field and all my gear out there so we could stream it. He could help me wire it up. I didn't know anything about electronics. I didn't know anything about the P-Rock boards at all. Even reading documentation, I'm just like, I'm too naive to risk breaking all this. So again, lean on somebody that knows more than you. And Ed knew a lot. And I learned a lot. This process has taught me that I can now just go build another pinball machine and I don't have to bother all these people anymore. maybe for a cnc cut but that's about it so we wire this thing up and ed gets it flipping for us and that moment of this thing that we drew in photoshop this thing we drew in illustrator this virtual pinball machine we built in vpx is now physically in front of me and i can hit a button and the flipper moves and it shoots a ball it was like what it's one of the moments you know you just brought this thing into life it didn't exist before so we do that we play it it's awesome but now i need to put all that gear on a play field that actually has inserts and stuff on it so i had to disassemble that carefully reassemble and then there's the whole idea of like wiring the lights uh getting the underside of this play field is hideous okay because I did the wiring for the lights myself. It's a rat's nest, but it works. I mean, look at this. Look at this light show. As far as the... So the current state of this game, this is a full pinball machine. We have three modes. There's two side achievement things you can do. We have a full-fledged multiball. 2X playfield is achievable. We have a shot doubler. You name it, we have all that stuff in here. This is a essentially finished game without art on the play field, and I didn't do animations for the game. And the programming on this, I can't thank Mission Pinball enough for their help in helping someone that doesn't know how to program figure out how to program. My hand was held so hard through this entire process. But again all of this was streamed so that I could help other people get through this the things we figured out other people don have to figure out anymore And I got all the footage to pile together for a little documentary that has been taking for absolutely way too long because the softwares we used, some of them were free at the time, aren't free anymore. So that sort of threw a wrench into a few of the things there. But yeah, finished freaking pinball machine. and again like i think we spent more time coding and just mulling over the wiring and stuff than we did designing the layout of this thing and i feel like that's that's a point of like encouragement like we this is a full game and this layout didn't take any time at all and if you want to go make your beetlejuice pinball machine your power rangers game like the resources are out there and I'm going to help try to also compile those a little bit better. But pinball makers website, and I can't stress this enough is a great place to start and finish when you're trying to build your things. Um, there's a great slack homebrew community out there. If I had a problem, I'd hop right in there and be like, Hey, my, one of my lights is being ridiculous. Is it plugged in upside down? Oh, I remember my screen was looking all faded and I'm like, Scott, bro, I think you sold me a bunk screen. He's like, is it upside down? I was like, oh, I, yeah, I installed it upside down because I don't, I don't know. I don't know. Um, this thing has been a journey. It's been an absolute journey. Um, there's been so many people's hands, different hands in this project, different companies. Um, And look at this. Stern, Mission Pinball, Scott Danesi, Multimorphic. This was a lot of people coming together to help someone that doesn't know how to do anything figure out how to make their own thing that they love. You know, and I can't thank everyone enough for helping me develop this. And if you're trying, and this is a little inside baseball, if you're trying to get hired as a designer at a pinball company, the best resume you can have is this. You could draw pictures all day. You could dream up whatever themes you want. If you could show that you have a physical representation of something that you love and you dedicated yourself to make it come to life, this is the best resume you could possibly have for getting hired at a pinball company. Thank you all at Cal Extreme for having me. Everyone in chat, if you sat through all of this, give me some hearts. I love you so much. Again, I'm Jack Danger. If you want to know more about this pinball machine, hit me up. There's some secret baseball stuff going on. It's going to be great. Everything's going to be great. All right. I love you all so much. Have a wonderful time. Stay safe out there. And I'll see you online, all right? Bye. Pinball. All right. Let's play a game. Look, it works. Look at this. You want to see some? Give me the freaking ball. Oh, you son of a bitch. Fire the EMG. Look at that. We got some animations. We got some animations. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 420e12bb-4fa6-4319-8da2-e93ed4c08cda*