# ToyShock Terminator 2 MOD

**Source:** RetroRalph  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2020-01-01  
**Duration:** 10m 25s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFSNwoTltdU

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## Analysis

RetroRalph documents a comprehensive virtual pinball cabinet build based on a Louie Toy Shark arcade cabinet, featuring a custom Terminator 2 mod. The project includes detailed PC specifications (AMD Ryzen 2600, GTX 1060, MSI X570 motherboard), custom cooling solution, and integration with PinballX frontend software. RetroRalph shares personal motivation for T2 theme tied to childhood memory of playing the original pinball machine, and demonstrates gameplay across multiple VPX tables including T2, Addams Family, and Attack from Mars.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] The Arcade1Up monitor replacement has awesome response time and great viewing angle suitable for virtual pinball — _Direct statement about monitor specifications and suitability for the application_
- [HIGH] System reached temperatures of 120-125°F after 30 minutes without proper cooling solution — _Explicit mention of thermal issues that necessitated the dual-fan cooling setup_
- [HIGH] The build cost slightly over $1,000 — _RetroRalph states 'I probably spent a little over a thousand dollars' during final thoughts_
- [HIGH] T2 pinball machine was located in a college dorm break room at his sister's school in New York — _Personal anecdote provided as motivation for T2 theme selection_
- [MEDIUM] The GTX 1060 graphics card has no problem running VPX T2 at maximum graphics settings — _RetroRalph observes 'The 1060 has no problem tearing through this game' during gameplay demo_

### Notable Quotes

> "Come with me if you want to dive in there."
> — **RetroRalph**, Opening
> _Terminator 2 reference establishing the cabinet theme_

> "I fell in love with the game and they couldn't get me out of the break room the whole entire trip."
> — **RetroRalph**, Motivation section
> _Personal connection explaining why T2 was chosen as the cabinet theme_

> "The cool thing about virtual pinball is you can enter it in all different ways"
> — **RetroRalph**, Final thoughts
> _Philosophy on virtual pinball accessibility across multiple platforms_

> "I feel like these virtual pinball projects are almost never ending because there's a million things you can add to them"
> — **RetroRalph**, Final thoughts
> _Observation about the endless customization possibilities in virtual pinball projects_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| RetroRalph | person | Content creator documenting virtual pinball cabinet build; host/speaker of video |
| Terminator 2 | game | Original pinball machine by Williams that inspired the virtual cabinet theme; source of personal childhood memory |
| Louie Toy Shark | product | Arcade cabinet being converted into virtual pinball machine; original hardware base for mod |
| Tyler Goodman | person | Graphics artist credited for cabinet artwork; linked in description |
| PinballX | product | Front-end software used to manage and launch multiple virtual pinball tables; compared to HyperSpin/BigBox |
| VPX | product | Virtual pinball simulation platform used to run T2 and other pinball tables in the cabinet |
| Harry Williams | person | Designer of original T2 pinball machine; credited during gameplay demo |
| Nick | person | Channel subscriber credited for providing the T2 VPX table |
| AMD Ryzen 2600 | product | CPU processor used in the cabinet build |
| MSI MPG X570 Wi-Fi | product | Motherboard used in the cabinet; described as great and easy to configure |
| GTX 1060 | product | Graphics card used in the cabinet; handles VPX T2 at maximum settings without issues |
| Thermaltake 500W | product | Power supply used in the cabinet |
| Arcade1Up | product | Wave 1 monitor used as backglass; includes video board used for HDMI conversion |
| Addams Family | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |
| Attack from Mars | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |
| Family Guy | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |
| Back to the Future | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |
| Tron Legacy | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |
| Firepower | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |
| Flintstones | game | One of the VPX tables loaded on the cabinet |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Virtual pinball cabinet building, PC hardware specifications and selection, Thermal management in arcade cabinets, VPX table gameplay and performance
- **Secondary:** PinballX frontend software configuration, Arcade cabinet modding, Virtual pinball accessibility across platforms
- **Mentioned:** Original Terminator 2 pinball machine

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.85) — RetroRalph expresses enthusiasm throughout the project ('super fun', 'I love love T2', 'nerdgasm'). Some minor frustration with PinballX learning curve but overall celebratory tone about the build and virtual pinball hobby. No negative criticism of hardware or games.

### Signals

- **[design_philosophy]** Virtual pinball cabinet prioritizing performance and aesthetics; GTX 1060 sufficient for maximum graphics on modern VPX tables (confidence: medium) — Demonstration of T2 running at maximum graphics settings with no performance issues; deliberate hardware selection balancing cost and capability
- **[technology_signal]** Virtual pinball cabinet building gaining prominence as accessible hobby; creator emphasizing multiple entry points from casual console play to custom builds (confidence: medium) — RetroRalph discusses various ways to enjoy virtual pinball from Xbox/PlayStation/Switch to custom cabinet builds, positioning it as an evolving hobby space

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## Transcript

 Do you own a toy shark? Come with me if you want to live. Let's dive in. right in. Okay, everyone knows the story on the monitor. This was out of circumstance, but whatever. The cool thing is, is this replacement monitor's got awesome response time and a great viewing angle, so it's got some key specs, which are going to kick ass for virtual pinball. And it does have a built-in amplifier, so you don't need to buy a separate amplifier for your audio. PC will pass everything to HDMI, which is awesome. So then, I have these two speakers underneath the cabinet right now. I don't have a permanent audio solution, so that's just what I'm doing right now, and it sounds great. As far as everything else goes, we'll start with the buttons. The buttons are all configured with a run-of-the-mill zero latency encoder that's like 10 bucks, so that works great. I'm not going to tell you how to configure it in this video. I'm going to have a third video on this that kind of goes over the configuration of all this stuff to make it simple and easy for you. The power supply is a Thermaltake 500 watt power supply, so decent power supply. It's working great for this configuration and then I'm using an AMD Ryzen 2600 processor. I'll have links to all this stuff if you're interested. Some of the stuff I tried to cut corners on some of it I kind of spent a little bit more money than maybe I should have. As far as the motherboard it's right here this is a MSI GP or sorry MPG X570 Wi-Fi. This motherboard's a great motherboard it was easy to configure and setup and then I'm using an SSD instead of a NVMe but you know I want to save some money and there's the 1060 graphics card. Now with all this gear in here you are going to need a really good cooling solution So this is something that surprised me as to how hot this could actually get so I show you what I came up with so far to cool this thing Before we talk cooling let look at this monitor real quick so the monitor that serving as the back glass is actually an arcade 1up monitor it a wave 1 arcade 1up monitor and this video board that's allowing me to plug HDMI into it is actually the same video board we've all been using to mod our arcade 1ups this button I installed the top of the back glass is to turn the unit on and off but let's get to the fan so the fan on the left is to bring cold air into the unit and the fan on the right is to bring hot air out. So kind of a cool solution. I had this system laying around so I figured why not use it. This part of the system is not required but it totally gave me a nerdgasm because it allows you to automatically operate the fans. It'll allow you to manually operate the fans. It'll let you set thresholds for the alarm if the system gets too hot. This is pretty much a requirement if you're going to run all this gear in here because it was getting to 120, 125 after 30 minutes. So this is a decent solution. It's probably not the best but it does work and it keeps the system cool. All right, guys, here it is. So why Terminator 2 Judgment Day? Well, before I get into that, I just wanted to say thank you to Tyler Goodman for kicking butt on these graphics. They'll be available on arcadegraphics.com shortly. So be on the lookout for it. I'll have links in the description. But why Terminator 2? So my sister went to college in New York, right? And in her dorm room, they had a pinball machine and that pinball machine was Terminator 2. So at the time I was like all hopped up on Terminator 2. I was super pumped up about the movie and I didn't even know there was a pinball game. Well, when I went into a dorm, like literally we went up, said hi, whatever. Then we went to the break room, which you're showing us around. I saw the actual Terminator 2 pinball machine. And the thing that immediately caught my eye was the way you launched the ball. Cause I had this really cool gun grip. Anyways, I fell in love with the game and they couldn't get me out of the break room the whole entire trip. Anything that we would do that wasn't in that break room pretty much annoyed me. So really cool that they had that pinball machine there. So let's talk a little bit about the cabinet. I reused all of the original controls. I added some new ones, but for the most part, it's the original flippers and nudge buttons. I'll probably upgrade those later, but I originally was trying to keep this economical and we kind of fell off the radar on that. But anyways, so let's get right into gameplay. I want to show you guys Terminator 2, and then I'll show you some of the other games I have loaded on it and sort of what my plans are for the future of the cabinet and then we'll do some final thoughts. All right here we go Terminator 2. So I want to thank Nick for providing me with this table. He's someone that subscribes to the channel. Super awesome of him This is the best version of the table I ever seen So let launch the ball So as you can see the performance of this is awesome I got the graphics pumped up all the way The 1060 has no problem tearing through this game If you've never played this game there's lots of objectives to the game. You'll see there's the ship over there on the side. When the ball gets loaded into the cannon it'll indicate where to hit the ship. Hopefully I can do that while we're watching the video here. Okay, here it is. The ball's loaded in the cannon. I gotta try to hit the ship. I got it. Sweet. You can check out the DMD above. You see it blew up and now it enabled multiball. So I just can't really see very good behind the camera here, so I'm kind of messing up. But it's pretty fun, man. Like I said, if you've never played this game, you gotta give it a shot. super super super fun. So if you guys watch the DMD you'll see it'll be adding up the score there. I got a pretty good jackpot. Aw crap. I wasn't paying attention. Alright let's see if we can get the... Aw I missed. Okay so I totally missed that top target but admittedly on this table that's probably the toughest one to hit so please check this game out have fun it's pretty awesome so guys I hope you get the point here I'm not gonna do a full you know playthrough of the game but man is this game fun if you've never played it so props to Williams this table totally kicks butt alright let me show you the other games real quick and then I'll show you how I've been messing with with pinball X the front end. I haven't got it all dialed in yet but we're almost there. So let's check out some of the other tables I have on this thing. I have Family Guy, ACDC, Adam's Family, Attack from Mars, the Flintstones, Tron Legacy, Firepower, and Back to the Future to name a few. Now you can find all these tables online and I'm going to have full tutorial video of how to do that but for now this is what I have and I will actually show you pinball X now which is the front end to control all this okay if you're new to virtual pinball then you're probably wondering what the heck is pinball X so pinball X is a front end so similar to like a hyperspin or big box it makes it look pretty right because in some of these systems you may have hundreds of games and so to sit there and individually launch hundreds of games could take a while now you could simply just have all these games as shortcuts on your desktop and launch it that way but if you want to look pretty pinball x is going to be the way to go i'm actually having some problems with pinball x right now and i think it's more of a learning curve on my part i'm still learning all this virtual pinball stuff so uh i'm having problems where sometimes the box art doesn't show up like what's happening right now even though I'm connected online and I have all the tables imported so I'm not really sure what's going on but anyways I'm gonna have subsequent videos walking through all this when I sort of understand it a little bit better myself so let's go to final thoughts and wrap this thing up alright guys it is final thoughts time so what did I think of this whole project this project was super fun I learned a ton about virtual pinball I've owned several of virtual pinball machines but I've never built one myself so this is a really really interesting project now I feel like these virtual pinball projects are almost never ending because there's a million things you can add to them you can add the feedback you can add like ball bearing switches for nudges and all sorts of crazy stuff so undoubtedly I think this is gonna be a topic that I continue to cover on the channel so the cool thing about virtual pinball is you can enter it in all different ways like this is pinball arcade playing behind me so there's so many ways you can enjoy it from just like sitting on your couch on an Xbox or on a PlayStation 4 on a Nintendo switch there's a bunch of fun ways but if you decide to go down this path of modding your toy shock uh i don't know is it worth it i don't know it there isn't i probably spent a little over a thousand dollars and there really isn't a three-quarter scale thousand dollar unit that could do what what we just proved so um so i don't know maybe it is worth it but that's up to you if whether or not it's worth it for me um i love love terminator 2 so this was just really fun uh honestly i may just have terminator 2 playing on that most of the time because it's just such a fun pinball game so definitely check it out so that's it guys those are my final thoughts we will have subsequent videos on this topic i want to do tutorials and walkthroughs it's just i'm getting ready for ces so i don't have time to do it right now so that's it guys i hope everyone had a great new year and everyone has an amazing 2020 so if you like this video please like it please consider subscribing to the channel give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and we will see you guys on the next one dog Community.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 7d236ec4-999b-44d4-94e8-6d0cce346e80*