The New Pinscape Build Guide

Welcome to the Pinscape v.2 Build Guide! This guide is my attempt to offer a comprehensive instruction manual for building a virtual pinball machine. The guide covers the complete process of building a pin cab, including the design of the physical cabinet, the trim and hardware, setting up the PC and TVs and other electronics, and installing the software. Of course, the guide also includes full documentation for the Pinscape Controller, an open-source electronic device that you can build yourself to handle many of the special features of a virtual pin cab: button inputs, plunger sensors, accelerometer-based nudging, and controlling feedback devices such as lights, solenoids, and motors.

First edition, October 2019

This first edition of the guide was completed in October, 2019. It was a work in progress for three full years before that, so if you visited earlier, while many sections were still just "To Do" outlines, you'll be pleased to hear that the full book is now complete. I'm continuing to revise the material on an ongoing basis, though, since the technology for pinball simulation and pin cab construction is still evolving. If you have any suggestions for areas where you'd like to see more coverage, or if you find any errata or out-of-date material, feel free to let me know about it.

Take me straight to the book!

The New Pinscape Build Guide
(Or, if you prefer, you can use the old experimental Choose Your Own Build Guide feature, which lets you select different subsets of the book.)

The old v1 guide

You can also still refer to the V1 Pinscape Controller Build Guide. That covers just the Pinscape Controller setup - it doesn't purport to be a full pin cab construction manual - so it's quite a lot more compact. But it's also terribly out of date at this point. The software setup in particular is nbow quite different from what's described in the V1 guide. The old software described in the V1 guide required manual configuration by editing the C++ source code, and that's no longer necessary, thanks to the interactive Config Tool used in the newer software. See the download page to get the latest software.