![]() The height of the cabinet was determined by the subwoofer, which is placed directly below the playfield screen. I measured the monitors, speakers etc and made models ('components' in Sketchup terminology) for them. I'll rotate it 90° and place it in the base cabinet behind the subwoofer (inspired by zany's build, see their video here which is much more fancy than my mounting). Originally I had planned on using two monitors, but after learning that my motherboard could drive three monitors simultaneously, I decided to get a third small (15") monitor for the dot matrix display ( DMD, which shows the scores among other things). I 'decased' my monitors, taking the plastic frame and back off to make the cabinet as slim as possible. Therefore I got a 5.1 speaker system, with the intent of placing two satellite speakers in the front part of the cabinet to play the sound effects, two satellite speakers in the backbox, and a subwoofer in the middle of the cabinet. The Visual Pinball and VPinMAME software is supposed to be able to separate the pinball table's music etc from the simulated sounds of the flippers and bumpers into separate speaker channels. ![]() I realized that I had to buy the major components so that I could adapt the size of the cabinet to the major parts (monitors, subwoofer and speakers, mainly). In the Github repo you can find different versions of the Sketchup model: I spent countless hours in December 2014 making a CAD model of the cabinet in Sketchup. ![]() My favorite pinball game, Tommy, worked fine, so I decided to go ahead with the rest of the project.Ĭross-posted from my Hackaday project page. Instead of paying hundreds of euros for Windows, I downloaded the free Windows 10 technical preview. Unfortunately it only runs under Windows. Up to this point, I had never run the Visual Pinball software, so I installed it to try it out. If neccessary I'll add a discrete graphics card.Īlso, I didn't think the motherboard / CPU would be able to drive three external monitors at the same time, but it turns out that it did. I wasn't sure if the Intel 4400 integrated graphics would be fast enough, but it works fairly well. I chose an Asus H97M-E motherboard with an Intel i3 4150 3,5 GHz CPU, 8 GB of fast RAM, and a 1 TB WD Blue 10EZEX mechanical hard disk. I also bought the single most expensive part of the project - the guts of a new computer. I ended up using the 24" monitor as playfield, exchanging the 23" monitor for the 20" IPS screen my desktop computer used, and using the 20" monitor for the back box. IPS monitors are good because they have good viewing angles. I got lucky, and bought one 23" and one 24" Dell IPS widescreen monitor for about €16 each. The first step was to see if I could find cheap used monitors. I decided this was the next project I wanted to do. Project Starts, Buying Monitors and ComputerĪround the beginning of December 2014, a friend of mine, Adam Klotblixt, told me about people building physical pinball cabinets with monitors as playfields, running the free Visual Pinball software. One goal has been to make it blend in as a piece of furniture in our living room, so it will be painted glossy white on the outside. I've made a project page at Hackaday for it, but I'll cross post my log to here, in gratitude of all I've learnt from these forums. It's at the stage of the final painting now, but I've been using most of my spare time to build rather than document it, so I have not documented it until now. I've been building a minicab around a 24" widescreen monitor as playfield.
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