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out-of-date material, feel free to let me know about it.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!
Choose Your Own Build Guide!
Note! This is an old experimental feature that I don't think
turned out to be all that useful. Early on, I thought it would be
helpful to let you filter the book into subsets, based on what you're
using in your cabinet. I thought this might reduce "information
overload" by hiding the parts that weren't relevant to your build.
In retrospect, I don't think this was all that helpful, so I've
hidden this feature behind an opt-in link (which I'm going to
stipulate that you just clicked, since this very text would be
hidden if you hadn't). The Build Guide overall has turned out to
so internally interconnected that it's hard to select a subset
without leaving out important cross-references.
And after thinking about it more, I realized that the traditional
ways of navigating books and Web sites are better than filtering
anyway.
This link contains all of your customization options, so you can
bookmark it to go directly to this version of the guide in the future.
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.