How I built a pinball machine. (My Cal Extreme 2020 quick seminar)

Dead Flip·video·14m 47s·analyzed·Aug 2, 2020

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.024

TL;DR

Jack Danger details complete homebrew pinball build process using VP, CAD, CNC, and Mission Pinball Framework.

Summary

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

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
medium confidence · 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'
The entire layout design process took approximately 24 hours, compared to months that professional designers typically spend
high confidence · 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'
George Gomez provided a large box of parts to help Jack Danger prototype his machine
high confidence · 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'
Building a homebrew pinball machine is very labor intensive and very expensive
high confidence · Jack states: 'if you're trying to build your own pinball machine this is very labor intensive and it's very expensive'
Having a physical homebrew pinball machine is the best resume for getting hired as a designer at a pinball company
medium confidence · 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@ 0:40 — 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@ 9:38 — 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@ 11:56 — 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@ 10:54 — 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@ 6:30 — Explains why he chose Mission Pinball Framework over FAST boards—visual UI preferred over text-based coding

Entities

Jack DangerpersonScott DeniseypersonGeorge GomezpersonEd OwenspersonJerryperson Mission Pinball FrameworkproductVisual PinballproductMultimorphic P-ROCproduct

Signals

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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
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'
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community_signal: Homebrew pinball community highly collaborative with experienced members (Scott Denisey, Ed Owens, Jerry) actively mentoring newcomers with equipment and expertise
high · Multiple instances of friends providing significant technical help, equipment, and time; Slack community providing rapid troubleshooting assistance
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market_signal: Building a physical homebrew pinball machine emerging as viable career entry strategy and portfolio piece for pinball design industry positions
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'
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operational_signal: Significant barrier reduction in homebrew pinball building through freely available tools (Visual Pinball, Mission Pinball Framework, Pinball Makers templates) and community documentation
high · Jack repeatedly emphasizes Pinball Makers website, free CAD programs, and documented blueprint templates as enabling factors for non-expert builders
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technology_signal: Mission Pinball Framework actively improving developer experience based on real-world user feedback from non-programmer builders

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.044

0:00

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 Denise. 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.

6:13

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.