# From Pixels to Pinball: The Cuphead Homebrew - Pinball Expo 2025 - Pinball News

**Source:** Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2025)  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2025-10-17  
**Duration:** 29m 23s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kv3hk0xmIw

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## Analysis

Scott Miller presents his Cuphead homebrew pinball machine project at Pinball Expo 2025, detailing the journey from visual pinball to physical construction. He discusses design philosophy, software frameworks (Mission Pinball Framework, CobraPin board), playfield design techniques, 3D printing, artwork creation (including AI-generated options), and mechanical solutions. The presentation emphasizes problem-solving, resourcefulness, and the viability of homebrew pinball as a creative outlet for enthusiasts.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Visual pinball physics are reliable enough that games playing well in VP will likely play well in real pinball — _Scott Miller stated professional pinball designers use VP as whitewood/pre-whitewood testing before physical builds_
- [HIGH] Mission Pinball Framework is strongly-typed and difficult for beginners due to indentation and capitalization sensitivity — _Scott Miller personal experience with MPF during Cuphead development; noted good documentation and user group support exist_
- [HIGH] CobraPin board uses ESP32s and integrates switch input, addressable LED control, and coil output in single device — _Scott Miller detailed technical specifications of board he beta-tested for Thomas Foldenweider_
- [HIGH] Cuphead homebrew originated from Pete Morrison's visual pinball table that was redesigned with two-inch flippers and Zale-style multiball — _Scott Miller and Adrian Wardelow modified the table; Pete Morrison approved and released as Cuphead Pro_
- [HIGH] Allied Leisure Thunderbolt donor machine cost $150 and parts resale offset most of the machine's build cost — _Scott Miller stated he made more from reselling unused parts than the cost of the machine itself_
- [HIGH] Direct substrate latex printing caused crazing on test playfield due to heat; UV-cured printing worked better — _Scott Miller's experience with Malzahn's successful UV-cured printing versus his failed latex attempt_
- [MEDIUM] Cuphead machine has been in continuous service since 2000-2001 with only one wall breakage in that period — _Scott Miller mentioned machine lifespan and durability of ABS walls_
- [HIGH] Orange Pi 5 running Linux port of MPF consumes less power and heat than full PC while maintaining adequate processing for pinball — _Scott Miller noted pinball machines don't require significant processing power; Jason assisted with Windows-to-Linux port_

### Notable Quotes

> "Visual pinball's physics are not real pinball. I don't want to say that visual pinball is the same, but the physics are so good that if it plays well in visual pinball, it will probably play well in the real world."
> — **Scott Miller**, ~10:30
> _Validates VP as legitimate design/testing tool for homebrew designers; legitimizes digital simulation workflow_

> "Be prepared to run into walls when you build these things. You'll find challenges that, like I said, how you overcome those really determines how the end product turns out."
> — **Scott Miller**, ~59:00
> _Core philosophy about homebrew development—problem-solving capacity defines final product quality_

> "Chat GPT is good at some things and not good at some other things. Don't ask it to give you a schematic for an electrical circuit. Some of the things it puts out looks like a squirrel in LSD, but it's good with code."
> — **Scott Miller**, ~14:45
> _Practical assessment of AI limitations and applications for homebrew code development_

> "I threatened several times to take it out in the backyard, pour kerosene on it, light it on fire. But my wife talked me out of it."
> — **Scott Miller**, ~58:00
> _Illustrates emotional intensity and frustration of extended homebrew projects_

> "These homebrews are a little bit like hot rods. Once you're done with them, you still keep playing around and tweaking them."
> — **Scott Miller**, ~48:30
> _Characterizes homebrew culture as iterative, ongoing passion projects rather than one-time builds_

> "I think if you look at a lot of the homebrews that you see here today, you'll find a lot more 3D printing on those as well."
> — **Scott Miller**, ~1:04:00
> _Notes 3D printing as emerging standard in contemporary homebrew construction_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Scott Miller | person | Presenter; homebrew pinball designer and builder; retired pin technician; created Cuphead homebrew based on Pete Morrison's VP table; experienced in EM restoration |
| Pete Morrison | person | Original Cuphead visual pinball designer; professional graphic designer; works in furniture industry; approved Scott's homebrew adaptation; provided artwork and speaker recommendations |
| Adrian Wardelow | person | Collaborator with Scott Miller on Cuphead; worked on games together; suggested two-inch flippers for VP redesign |
| Ben Heck | person | Professional pinball designer; visited Scott's workshop; provided critique and mechanical design feedback on Cuphead; helped resolve playfield issues with cardboard/masking tape prototyping |
| Thomas Foldenweider | person | Electrical engineer; designer of CobraPin board; Scott was alpha/beta tester for the board |
| Jason | person | Computer scientist; assisted Scott with MPF Windows-to-Linux port for Orange Pi 5; met Eugene Jarvis at MGC with Scott |
| Eugene Jarvis | person | Legendary arcade/pinball designer; created Defender, Raw Thrills games, worked for Williams Pinball, cruising games; met Scott Miller at MGC; major philanthropist (donated largest grant to DePaul University CS department) |
| Rob Burke | person | Pinball operator/collector; organizer of Pinball Expo; invited Scott to present at MGC; mentioned as possible future recipient of spare Cuphead playfield |
| Malzahn | person | Pinside user; currently building homebrew; used AI-generated artwork for playfield; successfully implemented UV-cured direct substrate printing |
| Cuphead | game | Homebrew pinball machine designed/built by Scott Miller; based on Pete Morrison's visual pinball table; EM-style with two-inch flippers, video backglass, addressable LEDs, in continuous service since 2000-2001 |
| Pinball Expo 2025 | event | Event where Scott Miller presented Cuphead homebrew build; held at MGC location; showcased multiple homebrews |
| Mission Pinball Framework | product | Open-source Python-based software framework used by Scott for Cuphead code; strongly-typed; has user group support; documentation available; alternative to writing code from scratch |
| CobraPin board | product | Interface control board using ESP32s; handles switch input, addressable LED control, coil output; communicates with PC; Scott beta-tested it; electronics design bulletproof with fused protection |
| Orange Pi 5 | product | Single-board computer running Linux-ported MPF for Cuphead; replaces full PC; consumes less power/heat; runs pinball software efficiently |
| Allied Leisure Thunderbolt | game | Donor machine purchased for $150; used as cabinet base for Cuphead; parts recycled/resold to offset cost |
| Fusion 360 | product | CAD software used by Scott for designing 3D-printed components including speaker grill, ball trough scoop, acrylic plastics |
| Cricut vinyl cutter | product | Device used to create detailed stencil masks from SVG files for cabinet artwork; produces clean, detailed results |
| Pinball Life | company | Parts retailer; Scott sourced many Cuphead components from them |
| Ted Zale | person | Pinball designer referenced as influence; Scott and Adrian modeled Cuphead's two-ball multiball mechanics after Zale-style design |
| Steve Young | person | Source of two-inch flipper bats used in Cuphead; supplier of aftermarket flipper components |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Homebrew pinball design and construction, Visual pinball as design/prototyping tool, Software frameworks (Mission Pinball Framework), Control board hardware (CobraPin, ESP32), 3D printing and CNC manufacturing for pinball components, Playfield artwork creation (stenciling, decals, direct printing)
- **Secondary:** AI-assisted artwork generation for pinball, Cabinet restoration and donor machine repurposing

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.85) — Scott Miller demonstrates passion for homebrew pinball, celebrates problem-solving and creativity, emphasizes rewarding aspects of the build while honestly discussing frustrations and technical challenges. Community support (Ben Heck, Jason, Rob Burke) reinforces positive collaborative culture. Some frustration evident in discussions of failed printing techniques, but framed as learning opportunities.

### Signals

- **[community_signal]** Homebrew pinball community facilitates connection with industry legends; Scott's casual meeting with Eugene Jarvis at MGC exemplifies intersection of hobby and professional pinball culture (confidence: medium) — Eugene Jarvis attended MGC, engaged with Scott's Cuphead machine, asked technical questions; Scott's initial unawareness of Jarvis's legendary status suggests accessibility of event
- **[community_signal]** Homebrew pinball community provides collaborative technical support through forums (Pinside), peer consultation, and knowledge-sharing on specialized techniques (confidence: high) — MPF user group helped Scott resolve issues; Jason's expertise with Linux porting; Ben Heck's in-person mechanical design consultation; Malzahn's successful printing workflow shared with community
- **[design_philosophy]** Homebrew pinball culture emphasizes iterative improvement, post-completion tweaking, and problem-solving as core to final product quality; compared to hot rod culture (confidence: high) — Scott's statement about homebrews being 'like hot rods' with continuous tweaking; extensive discussion of mechanical problems and solutions; Orange Pi 5 upgrade after initial completion
- **[event_signal]** Pinball Expo 2025 showcasing significant quantity and quality of homebrew machines; event serving as platform for knowledge-sharing and community building (confidence: high) — Scott's presentation to large audience; mention of multiple homebrews visible at expo; Eugene Jarvis attendance and engagement with Scott's project
- **[market_signal]** Donor machine strategy (purchasing old commercial machines like Allied Leisure Thunderbolt for $150) remains cost-effective approach; parts recycling offsets build expenses (confidence: high) — Scott's donor strategy netted more from parts resale than the original machine cost; reduces overall project investment
- **[community_signal]** Scott Miller self-taught across all domains (electrical, mechanical, software, artwork); reliance on collaborative expertise from specialists (Jason for Linux, Ben Heck for mechanics, Pete Morrison for design) demonstrates distributed skill model in homebrew community (confidence: high) — Scott's explicit statement of self-taught status; consultation with brother (electrical engineer) and Jason (computer scientist); in-person mentorship from Ben Heck
- **[technology_signal]** AI-assisted content generation (Chat GPT for code, AI-generated artwork via Malzahn) emerging as viable tools for homebrew developers lacking specialized skills (confidence: medium) — Scott's positive assessment of Chat GPT's YAML code generation; Malzahn's AI-generated artwork described as 'stunning'; caveat that AI is unreliable for electrical schematics
- **[technology_signal]** Mission Pinball Framework has high barrier to entry for non-programmers due to strict typing, indentation sensitivity, and capitalization requirements; user group and documentation help mitigate but issue persists (confidence: high) — Scott's direct experience struggling with MPF; acknowledged need for external documentation and user group support; alternative consideration of Chat GPT for code generation
- **[technology_signal]** Single-board computers (Orange Pi 5, Raspberry Pi) replacing full PCs for homebrew control; reduces power consumption, heat generation, and hardware footprint (confidence: high) — Scott's Orange Pi 5 deployment with Linux-ported MPF; Jason's successful Windows-to-Linux port; Scott's note that pinball doesn't require significant processing power
- **[technology_signal]** Emerging use of 3D printing and CNC manufacturing as standard techniques in contemporary homebrew pinball construction; Scott notes 'a lot more 3D printing' visible at Expo 2025 homebrews (confidence: high) — Scott's extensive use of 3D-printed ABS components (scoop, fixtures, fixtures for LEDs, speaker grills); Malzahn's successful direct printing workflow; multiple attendees adopting similar techniques

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## Transcript

 I was at the MGC this year and asked me to come speak to you today. So I put together a presentation that I call, Pixels to Pinball the Cuphead Homebrew. I've been involved with pinball ever since I was quite small. I had an uncle who had a Bally boomerang in his basement, but I didn't really get into pinball until I went to an MGC a number of years ago back when it was in Brookfield. And I had a great time with pinball and as I was leaving the floor I walked past some machines and thought, oh those look really nice. I was about 15 feet past when I realized there was something different about them. So I turned around and walked back and took a look at them, and I realized that they had TV sets for playfields, and that was my introduction to visual pinball. I've been very involved in visual pinball for a number of years. These are some of the tables that I've authored. I like doing EMs, and I've helped other people with the code on their particular tables. And I mention that because Cuphead's origins is in visual pinball. I downloaded the table a number of years ago and loved it. I contacted a good friend of mine, Adrian Wardelow, who works on games with me, and I said, have you seen this new Cuphead table? He said, yeah, I think it's great. I said, you know what it needs? He said, I absolutely know what it needs, two-inch flippers. So we're Rob Burke, or Rob Burke called us to come here, but we're big fans of Ted Zale. And so we redesigned the table with two-inch flippers, Zale-like two-ball multiball, added some other features to it, and we thought, wow, this is a really nice table. So I did not know the author of the table, Pete Morrison, but I reached out to him and said, hey, we love what you did on this table. It's great. We made a few modifications to make it more EM-like. Thank you for what you did. And he got back to me and said, oh, I love what you guys did. Can I re-release the table as Cuphead Pro? We said, absolutely. And so with the Cuphead Pro's release, it was a huge hit that year. And taking a step back, another friend of mine from Visual Pinball, Dan, blew my mind a year or two before that by showing me that you could actually build your own pinball machine, which I thought, that's incredible. I'd love to do that someday. But I don't have the creativity to come up with a theme and the shots and so forth. And so when I saw Cuphead, I thought, this is it. I contacted Pete. I said, can I release your machine as a homebrew? He said, absolutely, go for it. And that's the origins of Cuphead. Before I talk about some of the details of Cuphead, I'd like to talk about some design aspects. I think every pinball machine has, be it the latest graded Stern machine or humble homebrew like my Cuphead. And let's see how Cuphead checks the boxes on these. First is theme and artwork. I think the artwork on Cuphead is outstanding, but that's because Peter, the guy who made it, is a professional graphic designer, so he knows fonts, colors, layout, all of that stuff. One of the other themes I thought I'd like to have for this is I'd like to have some animated videos playing on the back glass, since Cuphead is originally a video game, which is wicked hard, just like the pinball machine is. And so with those in mind, I thought that the theme and the artwork fit very well with an old-style EM. Again, went with the two-inch flippers for that. Now, you might think, well, that's all good and fine. I'm not a graphic artist either. I don't know how to do the artwork for a play field. I think you might agree this artwork is stunning. This was done by a guy in Pinside who's building a machine right now, Malzahn. And these were all generated using AI. The prompt for the one on the right was three aviators full on in the style of a 1950s sci-fi comic book. And this is what it kicked out. So AI could be a good solution for some people in terms of their artwork. Second is the rule set, and rule sets can vary from a simple, humble EM like Cuphead to the latest, greatest, multi-level wizard-moded modern machine. that's really up to you however you want to set that up and then lastly the third are shots and for shots I consider anything that has to do with play field layout be it how are you gonna plunge the ball onto the play field how many flippers are you gonna have how many pop bumpers is it gonna be multi-layered or single-layered those are all up to you as a designer of your machine one thing that I would like to say though is before you build your machine you have to build a white wood to get your shots tuned. I was about 95% certain that Cuphead was going to be awesome just because it played well in visual pinball. Visual pinball's physics are not real pinball. I don't want to say that visual pinball is the same, but the physics are so good that if it plays well in visual pinball, it will probably play well in the real world. And some designers, professional designers of pins actually use visual pinball as their white wood or their pre-white wood. So I would suggest if you're interested in making a homebrew and you don't want to make a lot of sawdust and make multiple, multiple whitewoods, consider using visual pinball as your first line of design. Now for the gory details, before I spent a dime on this project, I wanted to make sure I could get the software working because if I can't get the software working, there's no sense in continuing with it. To my mind, you have two options here. You can choose the computer language that you like best, like C++ or Python or whatever, write all the code yourself. Another option is to use something called a framework, which is what I did. And this is Mission Pinball Framework, which is a very popular one. A framework is basically a series of methods that have been designed that you can use so that you don't have to code everything. You don't have to handle all the low-level logic like player management, ball management, mode management. All of those take place within the confines of the of the framework I did find however that mission pinball framework was very hard for me to work with because it's strongly typed and what that means is if you have your indentations off by one space you capitalize something that shouldn't be capitalized or if you can't think of what the designers thought of when they came up with the way of doing something it's hard thankfully there's good documentation out there for it also there's a user group that's happy to answer questions in fact one of the guys on the user group designed the score reel setter and cuphead they didn't exist before that so it's a great group of guys to work with one thing that you can utilize today that wasn't available to me back in 2021 is again ai this is chat gpt i asked it to create a yaml file yaml stands for yet another markup language for a config file for just a generic mpf file and it came up with this which which is letter perfect. Chat GPT is good at some things and not good at some other things. Don't ask it to give you a schematic for an electrical circuit. Some of the things it puts out looks like a squirrel in LSD, but it's good with code. It's good with code for the most part. So this is another option for you if you find that you're having problems with a particular topic and you can't quite figure out how to code it. You're also going to need an interface board. The interface board is a board that the computer communicates to and it also receives switch information from the play field. I chose to go with the CobraPin board. I was the beta kind of alpha tester for it for Thomas Foldenweider. Brilliant guy. He's an electrical engineer, and he came up with this board that uses ESP32s. It communicates with your PC and it can take both direct switches which are on the lower right as well as switch matrix It can control two sets of addressable LEDs and it also can output high current devices for coils. So everything all in one. This was really a pleasure to work with. There were a few bugs that we had to work out, mostly with software, but the electronics design is bulletproof, and it's also fused on there too as well. So you get all in one device with this. You're going to need to figure out how you want to build the machine. And here you have two options. Again, you can build the entire cabinet yourself. I've done that before. It's a pain and it's costly. Or you can try to find a donor machine, which is the route that I took. This is a Allied Leisure Thunderbolt that I bought for $150. bucks and anything that I didn't use in Cuphead was resold and recycled so that other Allied Leisure machines can lead long and productive lifespans. So the transformer, the MPU board, chime unit, the displays all got recycled and used in other machines. But when you get one of these, not only are you getting a cabin ahead, but you're getting things you might not think about like side rails, legs, coin door and such, plus also the mix that you might be able to reuse on it. You'll find that you run into some mechanical issues when you're designing and building your homebrew. One of mine was I wanted two-inch flippers and that's not what Allied Leisure puts out. So in this case I had some two-inch flipper bats from Steve Young and I also had some shoes lying around so I was able to grind the shoe down to make it fit the bat, tap the top of it so it could receive the retaining screw. And then if you've ever worked on an Allied Leisure game you know they love nylon. Everything is made out of nylon in that machine and the flippers are no different. So the flipper axle was cut off. I drilled a hole in the top. I tapped it. I also threaded the shoe so that it fit in. In Presto Magic, you've got two inch flippers on an allied leisure machine. I usually work with EMs mostly and I restore machines. So this is a technique that I use when I'm restoring a cab for an EM. If you ever look at one, you'll notice that there's always overspray because when they were made, a couple of guys with cigarettes in their mouth were holding up a stencil with a big spray gun, spraying all sorts of nasty paints on the side of the machine. And I can reproduce that by displaying artwork on a wall on a piece of cardboard, which I then trace, and then I cut the cardboard out to make a stencil. And the stencil can be held up next to the machine, and you can spray paint that. If you have anything that has a lot of detail to it, like the cuphead figure and the mugman figure on the side, I use a Cricut vinyl cutter for that. You make a SVG file and the vinyl cutter does all the rest and it makes a beautiful, nice, clean mask. And here you can see the result of the mask and the painting of the machine. Not everything when you make a homebrew is a bed of roses. You'll find that you run into problems along the way and how you solve those problems, how you deal with those problems have a big part in how well your machine turns out. When I refinish rehab EMs, I oftentimes have to redo the aprons on them. And my technique is to sand them down bare, hit them with high build auto primer to get them level for any pitting on them. And then I make masks with vinyl to do all the lettering on it. In this case, I tried a different spray paint from what I normally use. And you can see it lifted. So I had to redo all of it. And I put on my can Rust-Oleum American Acid. It binds to plastic, wood, metal and more, but not very well. So I won't use that one again. Also, I was able to do masking to put little goblets instead of Gottlieb on the flippers and also do the shooter. Since I wanted video on this game, I needed to have some way of displaying it and this is a technique that I stole from a friend of mine, Dan, that he used in his visual pinball cab. Basically, you take the head and the top of the cabinet and mark out the size that your TV set is and cut that out. And then the TV set actually sits down through the cab, and here you see I've got it shimmed up with a can of primer and some 2x4s to get it in position. You can then put a crossmember on the back that you can bolt it down to to hold everything in place, and you're all set. I also cut a big hole in the back for a subwoofer, and because I have a small CNC machine, I was able to CNC a cover for that as well. Here you can see the machine in an early prototype stage. I didn't have a lot of room to the sides, so Pete, the designer of Cuphead and Visual Pinball, who's not only a graphic designer, but he works in the furniture industry, had these beautiful full-range speakers that he sent to me that I was able to mount on the sides. A lot of work was done in Fusion 360, and this is a grill that I designed for Cuphead in Fusion 360. And this is a little trick you can use in Slicer. you don't necessarily have to put top and bottom layers on and you can allow your infill to show through. So here the honeycomb infill actually makes the grid for the speaker cover. And you can see I can put hard points in it so that I've got spots that my screws from the back can get into to hold them in place. I needed to make a cover to cover up the TV set, and this is a trick that is used in the arcade side of things. Basically, you take a sheet of glass or a sheet of plexiglass in this case, mask off the area that you don't want to have painted, and paint the back side of it. You can use any kind of paint you want. It can be flat, it can be satin, it can be gloss. It doesn't really matter because when you're done, it looks beautiful from the front because you see the sheen of the surface of the glass or the plexiglass. I then cut out a sheet of wood to be my white wood, and this was actually a very satisfying time to see this in the machine. starting to look like something now. That white wood was taken out and I had a full-size print of the cuphead playfield made at OfficeMax. I then took an awl to mark the centers of all the holes that would be needed to drill as well as any slots and other things that might need to be machined in it. I designed this little fixture that goes on the end of a Forstner bit that allows me to use it as a depth stop so I could stop at the right depth for my inserts and then complete the hole using another bit to clear out the light hole. This is a little jig that I made for doing the shooter lane. It's basically a ramp, an incline ramp that holds my Colt router and the Colt router gets a one inch ball bit on it and then that makes a deep cut at one end and makes a zero cut at the other as you run it up from end to end. I needed lighting for this and I chose addressable LEDs. The reason why I did addressable LEDs for the GI is because when you get a multiball setup in Cuphead, the entire play field glows red because you have to hit the double bumper and the double bumper flashes. So that's why I didn't use the standard conventional GI lighting. So the GI lighting is the stuff on the left and on the right, those little disks are my controlled lighting. For the controlled lighting, I designed these little fixtures that hold the disks in place so that I can solder the three leads onto it. You need power, ground, and data. And then there's a key that fits into it that allows it to be mounted to the bottom of the play field For the GI lighting I designed a little clip that goes onto the playfield that holds a GI light in place And if anybody needs any of these files please contact me afterwards. I can get them to you. This is a scoop for the ball trough that I designed in Fusion 360. And all these are printed in ABS, because ABS is a very durable plastic for this. Here you can see I'm starting on the test playfield, the white wood. You start with the lowest level and build your way up. So the first level that goes down is the lighting. Here you can see the controlled lighting going into place. Anything that I wanted to have that would be removable, like pop bumpers or drop target banks, all have Molex connectors for easier servicing if anything should need to be done for that. And in the end, this is what it looked like when everything was all wired up. Many of the parts were original to the Allied Leisure. Some parts were bought online. Many parts came from Pinball Life. And here we have lights on the play field showing up for the first time. This is really exciting to see because this is really starting to show that it's turning into a pin. In addition to the work on the inserts and such, I had to bend all the wire forms for it. So those were bent. And I also had to design ABS walls for it. You could choose to use something like Send Cut Send if you want to do steel walls. I just went with ABS for this. And then Ben Heck stopped by, and it was very useful to have Ben come by because, as you probably know, he's a professional designer, and I wanted to get his opinion on the machine and what things could be improved by it, and it was very helpful to me. This looks like John Dillinger shot the play field up. It's because I had to plug and try and retry and try again to get this one particular section to work right. It deposits a ball into that lane on the right-hand side. Ben came over, took some cardboard and some masking tape, bent up a wall that worked perfectly. I shot a picture of it from a distance so I didn't have any parallax, and then printed this wall, and that works awesome for us now. In addition to that, Ben said it's probably not a good idea to allow the player to shoot directly at a pop bumper. So I made this little toy to go with it. If you're familiar with Cuphead, his henchman is King Dice. And so the little King Dice protects the devil from being hit during the multiball. And he sort of leers at you with his little mustachioed face. The walls that were originally made out of black ABS, I reprinted in clear and I thought that made for a nice lighting effect. So here you can see one of the test ones in place that allows the lights actually show through the wall onto the play field. field and these walls have been very durable this machine was built in 2000 2001 it's been continuous service since then and I've had one wall break in that time period once all that was done and I was confident that my white wood was good I laid everything out in v-carb desktop which is a program that can be used for making CNC route patterns and I went over to my buddy Ben's house I I brought along some spotted cow and some plywood, and we let his CNC machine do the work. Now, I don't necessarily recommend drinking beer and using power tools, but since the machine was doing all the work, I thought, eh, we're probably fine. And the end result was excellent. You get a beautifully reproduced play field, and we made two of them because I wanted a practice play field and then the final play field after that. Once I took it home, I painted the back Battlestrip gray because that's what we do in pinball, and then I put all of the inserts into the two playfields. This is a trick from woodworking that you can use when you want something to be perfectly flat. You take a pencil and mark across it and sand till all the pencil marks are gone, then you know it's flat. And if you've ever worked with inserts before, you realize that they're meant to be put in slightly proud. They have mold markings on the tops of them, they have to be removed. Then it was time to do the artwork, and Pete helped me out again. Being a graphic designer, he knew a place that could do direct substrate printing. So I made the little chip that you see here. So it's got indexing on it to see if we can get our lines to line up with a saucer hole. It's got an insert to see how printing over the insert goes. I coated it with shellac and sanded it flat so it was a perfectly flat surface for them to print on. And if you look at the bottom left where it says collect sole contracts, you'll see there's crazing. and that crazing they think is because of the heat that was used in the latex printing process so unfortunately I wasn't able to use that I had to go a different route having said that though Malzahn the guy that I pointed out before did do direct substrate printing on his play field and had a great result but he used a UV cure which I don't believe uses the same amount of heat that the latex one does so instead of a nice easy send it off and have the whole thing printed at one time I had to do it all by hand. So I printed a full-size graphic and used that to mark my stencil lines, and I stenciled or I masked off the play field, and because Pete used yellow, unfortunately, yellow covers nothing. It's one of the worst paints to work with, so I had to first prime it with white and then do my yellow paint. So when I was done, I had what you see at the top, which is paint over tape. When you tear the tape off, you have a rough edge. You then sand that down, put a coat of gloss coat over it so now you've got a step off of clear coat, sand the clear coat down flat, and then put another layer of clear coat on top of it. And what you end up is something that looks like this. You might wonder why I put clear coat on top. If you ever think back to when you made models, perhaps as a kid and you did this really cool Panzer tank and flat, and then you put your decals on it and they all frosted. decals don't like going on surfaces that aren't gloss so a glossy surface is best I then use Photoshop to lay out all the segments that I needed to print in decals so with decals if you print anything with color it has to go on to white the color that a printer puts out is calibrated to be on a white sheet and so if you put it on clear your reds will be kind of rosé pinky things so So everything had to be done on white that had a color to it. And with the Cricut design that I use, it has a really neat feature called print and cut. The print and cut will actually put a bleed line around the outside. So whenever it does its cut, it's always cutting in color. You never get any white on the outside edges. With all of that in place, I set about putting all of these decals down and they're not very large because I'm limited to eight and a half by 11 paper. they all had to be spliced together one by one. I found that the clear that I used for inserts did not block light well enough because it's just toner, it's laser toner, so I had to put multiple layers of it down to be able to get the light occlusion that I needed for that. In the end that what the play field turned out like and I thought wow this is really good that my practice one now to make the real one To make the one that went into the machine I got smart and I used clear as my index so the clear had a black print on it and I could then line up any of my colors over the top of that so I not guessing as to where things need to lie in this large amount of space I also did a few other little details to it again since this is an EM we make a nod to Gottlieb so it's a D goblet company instead of Gottlieb there's a little manufacturer certificate that we made for it and with their address. Someone on Pinside suggested that I use cup head coins as the domination for it so I made a couple little cup head coin inserts for the coin door. Because my CNC machine is large enough to do plastics I CNC'd all the acrylic plastics using that and then I used a this is a trick you can use actually if you're restoring machine you got a plastic that's missing you can print a clear decal to put on the back side of it so that it registers through from the bottom and then print a white decal or just a plain white decal cutout that goes to the top of that and that'll allow the color on that clear to show through normally and it has about the right light occlusion to look like a standard a silkscreen plastic so now I got everything set up and ready to go now you have to strip down your white wood so I used a white board for whatever reason and you just take off the layer so you take off the hot top layer get that all transferred off for the machine and then you start on the bottom layer again this is me putting down all the GI and the controlled lighting and then eventually all the rest of the lighting goes back and the rest of the the mechs go back on top of that I also went through and did some EM style wire harnesses and the end result turned out really good I was very pleased with it and the game game played well it looks looks very nice. These homebrews are a little bit like hot rods. Once you're done with them, you still keep playing around and tweaking them. And one of the things that bugged me is I've got this big honking PC sitting there doing very little to nothing, generating a lot of heat, taking up space. And as you know, things tend to fall off the playfields onto what's underneath them. So I always had to have a shield over the top of it to prevent it from shorting if any screws or other hardware fell off. Jason, who's in the fifth row over there, who's a brilliant computer scientist helped me out here. This is an Orange Pi 5. Little tiny board sits on the wall and he was able to help me do a MPF Windows to Linux port and then also figure out the proper way to be able to get that software onto an Orange Pi 5. And so this little Orange Pi 5 sits on the wall, nothing's going to fall onto it and it runs nice and cool. These pinball machines don't need a lot of processing power. You could probably run a pin on a Raspberry Pi if you really wanted to. This Orange Pi 5 works beautifully for our purposes. And then for the MGC I thought, well this thing needs a topper and I work as a pin tech, I'm retired, but I go work as a pin tech for a large collector in our area and he had this Godzilla machine that had this really cool holographic fan topper. So I went on Amazon and found these holographic fans. They come with the software on them to convert mp4 files into the exe files that the machine uses and I used a combination of blender that cuphead that's spinning is actually a shape made in blender that's then rotated with the camera looking at it and then also some work in Photoshop to make the other animations that you see so that in summary is the building of cuphead does anybody have any questions yeah I'm sorry, what's that? Yeah. Yeah. That's made out of clear ABS. Very cheap, yeah. The cost on the machine is a lot less than you might think it was. I think from what I sold off of the original Allied Leisure Thunderbolt, I made more than the cost of the machine itself, and it helped offset a lot of the cost. But 3D printing worked out very well for that. And I think if you look at a lot of the homebrews that you see here today, you'll find a lot more 3D printing on those as well. But, again, if you want to make these out of steel, Wally told me about Send Cut Send that he uses on his machines that he rebuilds in or builds from scratch, I should say. And that's another very fine option for you. Any other questions? Yeah, Rob. It is. It's in the very back of the homebrew. If I ever make one, Rob, it'll be for you. I do have a spare playfield. Actually, if you go back by my cuphead machine, you'll see the practice playfield hanging up next to it. I took addressable LEDs and wired the backside of it, and then there's a little ESP32 in controlling it. So it runs light shows where it strobes from side to side and goes around in circles. But, yeah, I have a second playfield. If I ever got another Allied Leisure Thunderbolt, I might consider building one for you. five all right that's good i think i might run into some troubles though with copyright law on that i'm not sure yeah yeah yes thank you way longer than it should have it's extremely it was it was a long process and it was could be very frustrating. In fact, I threatened several times to take it out in the backyard, pour kerosene on it, light it on fire. But my wife talked me out of it. Be prepared to run into walls when you build these things. You'll find challenges that, like I said, how you overcome those really determines how the end product turns out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm all self-taught on all of that yeah I'm not an electrical engineer I have a brother who is though which is awesome because then I can hit him up for information but no all this is learned from the school of hard knocks yes yeah does anybody know who that is I'm talking to you do who is it yeah this shows you how little I know so I'm at at the MGC with Jason and we're standing around Cuphead and his eyes pop out of his head he said do you know who that is I said no that's Eugene Jarvis And I walk away and say, who's Eugene Jarvis? So, hey, I'm Scott. Oh, I'm Eugene. Where are you from? Oh, Chicago. He's like going up to, oh, I'm Paul. Where are you from? Liverpool. Yeah, no. I just didn't realize I was talking to a rock star. I've probably been a lot more nervous. Oh, he designed Defender, Raw Thrills. He did all of the cruising games. He worked for Williams Pinball. Yeah, he's a rock star in this area. Yeah, he loved it. And he was very curious. He wanted to know a lot of tech. He asked a lot of really good technical questions. I thought, this guy's really smart. He also, I think, gave the largest grant ever to DePaul University's computer science department. So he's very philanthropic as well. Great, thank you.

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: ba4e2a87-6c56-43f0-b939-4e4ee8eb2f6a*