This is just horrible. Just horrible. :(

[rickshaw92]

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/...he-digital-age

Revamping pinball machines for the digital age
Published On Sun Sep 04 2011Email Print (3)


John Holm has spent hours ... and hours ... gutting a retro pinball machine and fitting it up with LCD screens so he can play digital pinball with the traditional controls.
CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR
Cynthia Vukets
Staff Reporter

How much would you pay to recapture part of your childhood?

Michael Wong happily dropped $9,000 this year.

“It’s like an addiction,” he says of his hobby — turning old pinball cabinets into digital game machines.

The software developer, 33, says he grew up in the “Golden Age” of arcades — dark places where kids from gangs would hang out and he’d feel so cool, whipping his friends at Street Fighter and running up a high score on the pinball machines.

Wong gutted a traditional pinball cabinet and then retrofitted it with a television screen and computer monitor, linking a digital pinball game to the old controls.

He isn’t the only one.

The hobby has about 40,000 followers, according to its online community VPForums.org. (The VP stands for virtual pinball).

John Holm, a creative director at Armstrong Partnership in Don Mills, keeps a digitized pinball cabinet in the back room of the office building. He spent about three months constructing it out of an old pinball cabinet, a television screen, computer monitor and PC. Those months include several weeks of all-nighters and weekends, although he hasn’t added up the number of hours it took.

“That’s not math that you necessarily want to do,” he says with a wry smile.

After constructing the cabinet, Holm “built” one of the digital games inside. A graphic designer by trade, he drew the game board, edited it, recorded sounds from a real machine and programmed it to run in sync with the cabinet’s original controls.

Speaking over the ‘click’ and ‘ping’ of the game emanating from computer speakers tucked inside, Holm talks about how gripping the cabinet’s metal corners and pressing his thumbs into the glass top are a physical connection to his childhood, a throwback to simpler times when he’d play one of two pinball machines in the back room of a deli in his hometown of St. Marys, Ont.

Todd Harrison, a computer hardware specialist and cabinet recreationist, recalls playing pinball and eating onion rings at the Stouffville burger joint he used to hang out at with his dad and brother. He says the virtual pinball community is full of people like him.

“All they want to do is recreate what pinball was like,” he says. “For the sake of nostalgia and for the sake of keeping a record.”

Wong says the digital retrofit machine in his basement lets him play against real people, just like back in the day, before video games killed the arcade. He says it’s a social thing, unlike online video games that allow players to hunker down alone in their basements, hunched over a computer.

“It’s not (like) getting your ass kicked at Mario Kart by some five-year-old Japanese kid,” he says.

And even for a pinhead who knows nothing about the game, these machines are pretty cool.

Draw back the old plunger and it launches a digital ball. Click the side buttons and digital flippers clack back and forth. Jiggle or bump the cabinet and an accelerometer card inside translates the movement into an effect on the ball, just like in a real pinball game.

Holm admits he might be a little bit addicted now. He even went on a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas this year specifically to visit the Pinball Hall of Fame. And Wong bought another old machine to keep in its original state, so he now has both the digital and the traditional options to play.

And at the end of the day, maybe pinball is a sort of Forrest Gump-like metaphor for life.

“The ball will always travel a different path. It will always be random. Every single game you play is completely different,” says Harrison. “As much as you think you’re in control, you’re never in control.”

[bigross86]

What's so bad? I think it's great. All these newfangled games confuse me. Pinball is simple and fun, especially when you've got 2 or 3 extra balls and you're trying to keep track of all of them

[Doktor]

I doubt that tilt is the same

[bigross86]

Jiggle or bump the cabinet and an accelerometer card inside translates the movement into an effect on the ball, just like in a real pinball game.

Dude seems to have thought of more or less everything

[bigross86]

Figured this might be appropriate:

[Doktor]

Dude seems to have thought of more or less everything

Risking to turn this into LP v. CD argument, I prefer old-fashioned pinballs, you know the ones that don't need reset or new lcd if you get pissed :D

[bigross86]

There is a certain advantage to those, yes...

[rickshaw92]

What's so bad?

Some things are sacred! At least I can pop into London's Intrepid Fox and play Addams Family.

[BB61Vet]

I dearly love the old pinball machines - there's something about the feel and play of them that can never be captured electronically. You'll always know down deep that it's just an imitation; no matter how many extra bells and whistles they add. Not to mention pinballs work wonderfully in homemade cannons

[gunnut]

Pinball games should be played with...a ball, not some stupid LCD screen with make believe ball.

Baseball should be played outdoors, using wooden bats, on grass.

A car's speedometer should be a dial, a real dial. Not an electronic facsimile or a digital readout.

Somethings are sacred. The ball in a pinball machine is one of those.