End Notes

Many thanks are due to the members of the virtual pin cab forums at vpforums. My own build would never have gotten off the ground if the forums hadn't inspired me with lots of great examples of what you can accomplish, and I wouldn't have made it very far without the forums' collective expertise to draw on. This is one of the most helpful and on-topic online forums I've ever encountered, with a dedicated group of regulars who go way out of their way to help the newbies and solve the tough technical problems that inevitably come up in a project this complex. A lot of the information in the Cabinet Building section of this book came more or less directly from forum discussions; my main contribution here was to organize it into a more accessible format. As much as the forums are a gold mine of useful information, their free-form discussion format makes it extremely difficult to find specific topics that were discussed in the past. I hope that this guide is at least a little easier to navigate than old forum threads.

Another big thanks to the open-source developers who created and continue to improve the collection of software that makes virtual cabs possible: Visual Pinball, VPinMAME, DOF, and B2S. I especially want to thank them for keeping it all open-source. That helps ensure a strong future for these projects, by empowering their user communities to improve them and build upon them, and to keep them going even after their original developers move on to other pursuits.

This book as you see it in your browser is generated from source code, written in a markup language devised specifically for this book, via a set of purpose-built php scripts.

The original motivation for the custom scripts was a combination of streamlining the markup syntax to my own working style, and some special needs I had in mind for conditional content generation that the standard markup languages aren't well suited for. I intended to let readers generate their own customized subsets of the material, based on the specific features they planned for their pin cab builds. The idea was that there are so many ways to build a virtual cab that it can get overwhelming to wade through the instructions for everything, so I thought I could help by letting you set filters to select only the sections related to features that you're interested in. As I wrote the material, though, I came to see that this wasn't as helpful as I had originally thought it might be. For one thing, I realized that there's much more material that's common to all pin cabs than there is unique feature-based material. For another, I found that there are so many necessary cross-references that I couldn't safely filter out very much material without a risk of links that go nowhere. Finally, when I stepped back and thought it about some more, I saw that this idea about filtering was a misguided attempt to reinvent a particular wheel that's already been so well perfected that I couldn't possibly improve upon it. Book writers have been organizing complex material for centuries, and in the process they've evolved a standard set of tools for the job: Tables of Contents, Indices, cross-referencing, and so on. I decided that these standard tools would serve my purposes better than an elaborate filtering scheme.

Most people (myself included) prefer to view technical material like this online, where it can be easily searched and where cross-reference links can be immediately followed, so my scripts are designed primarily with Web browser presentation in mind. However, I still have an old-fashioned affection for printed books, so I also tried to arrange things to produce pleasing hard-copy results. If you click the little Printer icon at the bottom, it will append all of the chapters together into a single (rather large) document that you can send to your printer to make a hard-copy edition.

A few people have asked about the CAD model that I used to generate illustrations throughout this book. Unfortunately, there's no practical way for me to share it, because it's based on an old proprietary software package that's no longer available, and it doesn't convert well to more modern formats (I've tried). Besides, most of the people who have asked were hoping to use the plans for CNC or 3D Print manufacturing, and I'm sorry to say that the plans wouldn't work for that even if you could coerce them into a usable modern format. The model isn't nearly accurate enough, or even correct enough, to use as a manufacturing template. The measurements are only close enough to look about right in the illustrations, and I had to take liberties in places to make things look right, at the expense of strict measurement accuracy. So you really wouldn't want to use any of my model as CNC or 3D Print inputs anyway. There are much better CNC plans and 3D Print plans available on the Web for many of the components, and I've referenced several of these in the text where I know of relevant examples.

	Cutaway view of a CAD model of a virtual pinball machine, used as the basis for many illustrations throughout this guide
	Start button from a Whirlwind pinball machine (Williams, 1990)
	3D rendering of plans for a standard-body pin cab replicating the Williams/Bally "WPC" cabinet design of the 1990s
	A flipper assembly (the parts under the playfield that actuate the flipper), from a Williams machine circa 1995
	A Williams System 11 CPU board, which contains the main control electronics used in Williams pinball machines manufactured circa 1986-1990; in many ways, it amounts to a stripped-down 8-bit personal computer from the Apple II era
	Closeup of an unpopulated main interface board for the Pinscape expansion boards
	The Extra Ball buy-in button from Theatre of Magic (Bally, 1995)

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.