This weekend, my friend Rafael Moretti spent some time with me buying electronics materials and starting to build and test a lamp controller board for my pinball machine.

This circuit was suggested to me by another friend, DalPoz, which explained to me how the circuit is supposed to work. Thanks!

Here is a video of the board (not yet completely built yet, but already flashing 4 lamps of the playfield):


The video is in brazilian portuguese, but there are subtitles for it in english. It seems to me that, for some reason, YouTube does not show subtitles for embedded videos, so you might want to watch the video directly in YouTube here (with subtitles)

This is how I intend to use dosbox to control the real pinball machine that I am building based on the design of Pinball Fantasies' PARTYland table:

This is a yet unfinished hack. I am modifying dosbox to act as a light & sensor controller for the real pinball machine. It would send on/off commands to real lights each time it detects an operation on the VGA pallete corresponding to the flashing lights in the game. It would also patch at runtime the variables that contain the x,y cordinates of the ball, each time the real ball touches a sensor, in order to put the virtual ball over the corresponding virtual sensor. This way, the original game acts as the firmware for the real machine, and no new code needs to be written. This method guarantees fidelity to the original game behaviour.

See photos of the pinball machine I am building on my flickr.

The following video shows me filling one of the light inserts using blue epoxy: