Zision Interactive

Using my flatbed scanner, I scanned the whole playfield in, since this is probably my only chance to access it completely flat

I'm hoping that I can stitch these together and use them to update my CAD drawing to match the hand-changes I made when assembling, though I've heard mixed results about how accurate this can be...

Then I put down my sheet of plastic, which I think is 1/32 lexan, and started marking holes for posts.

The main worry with this plastic is whether it'll bubble and expand, separating from the wood, which I've seen happen when trying to make playfield protectors. This is a bit thicker though, and lexan, not PET-G; I'm hoping one of those two factors will fix that issue. To test it, the best thing I could come up with is just to heat it up for a long period of time, so I set it up with a bunch of incandescent lamps pointing right at it, for lack of any better options

I'll leave this on all day, and see if the plastic rises up anywhere. If not, I'll proceed with cutting the rest of the holes+slots, and reassemble the game for further testing. Not sure if I'll also cut the hole for the screen at this point, or play it some with the protector first before going 'all in' and cutting a 10" hole in the playfield.

Game is getting increasingly hard to play due to the lack of a screen, so I decided it was time to bite the bullet and try installing the plastic sheet, which means I need to strip the whole playfield. Took it out of the cab for the first time in a while

In some places, I'm glad that past-me thought ahead and installed connectors
In other places, like the wires going to the trough mechs, I wasn't that smart, so I ended up cutting the wires, and I'll install a connector later. A few mechs I left hanging, since I didn't think to put connectors on them, and now they're wired in such a way that I can't easily add them.

Tear down went pretty quick and painless. There's not that much on top of the playfield, and all the drops have connectors so they're quick to remove.
The biggest pain was all the standups. They didn't get connectors either since they're so scattered, and some of them barely fit through the playfield. In a few cases I actually assembled them through the playfield to begin with, so I needed to disassemble the target again to get it out.

The paper has held up pretty well to being played on over and over.

When I first installed it I worried that the ball would rip it up when I started flipping but there's no tears at all, even in high traffic places.

I moved all the playfield components to a spare sheet of cardboard to keep track of them:
I wasn't very consistent about screws, posts, etc when assembling, and in some cases I even had to do stuff like grinding down plastic posts to make them shorter, so you really can't mix and match anything, and keeping it all straight like this is really important.

Taking off the paper reveals about what I'd expected: a ton of trapped sawdust everywhere. It's been messing with the ball and getting it stuck in places it seemingly shouldn't

It also reveals something I hadn't anticipated; the wood around every screw is slightly ripped up and standing above the playfield
I'm not sure if this is just normal, or if it's caused by me screwing everything in without drilling pilot holes. Luckily these sanded down easily without affecting the finish of the wood at all

With the playfield all torn down, next I'll need to start cutting the plastic

Installed a tilt bob, which had to go on the right side due to how I'd routed the wiring, etc. Even in this position I'm still going to need to trim the rod some to keep it from catching on stuff. Plus I need to earplug it!

With that installed, I realized I still had no way to kill power to the flippers, so I installed some relays too. Now the tilt works properly in game, and the flippers also aren't energized when there isn't an active game.

While opening the game to check on something, I noticed I had four pinballs piled in the front left corner of my cabinet. Occasionally, balls hit by the right outlane saver will airball over the lower left flipper/guide and fall down in there, and rather than grasping around for them I just grab another ball

So I set up an airball catcher, made from scrap lexan and attached to the existing ball guide

In order to get the height right, I also had to put the glass back in, which was a problem since I didn't have any siderails. I dug a pair of stern side rails (from replacing with lollipop rails) out of my spare parts, and they seem to fit the williams cabinet fine. Eventually I'd like to get proper williams rails on there, but I need to get the secondary holes for the extra flipper buttons, so that's been on the backburner. Since the stern rails are narrower, they fit above the buttons fine.

My lockdown bar is also still covered in rust, so I grabbed one from my whirlwind for now, and for the first time actually had the game assembled with glass+lockdown bar. It's surprising how much of a difference this makes. The game feels much more like a 'real' game. A lot of the noise gets quieted down, which also makes the gameplay feel smoother. A big improvement, although I still need to get a coin door skin somewhere...

With the mechanisms quieted by the glass however, it becomes much more obvious that I don't have any sound effects! I think this is going to be a big focus soon; I need to start finding (or recording) sound effects and callouts for everything. I'm not really sure how I want it to sound either. Most card themed pinball machines are EMs, and the solid state ones fall into that weird early 80s state where the only sound effects that could be generated were laser blasts and explosions (Eight Ball Deluxe always stood out to me for this). By the time sound designers were free to use any sound effects they wanted, poker themes weren't really popular. I think the only two games that'd fit that category are High Roller Casino and World Poker Tour. For better or worse, the sounds on those have never really stood out to me, to the point where I can't actually remember what they sound like to use as a reference. For a while I was tempted to stick a chime box in this game and call it done, but I'd like to try to get some actual sound effects in.

For now, I think I'm going to try to make all the sound effects be related to actual poker. Chips clinking, cards being shuffled, etc. Not a ton to work with but maybe it'll be enough. Not sure how that'll feel as a pinball game either though....

After more playtesting, I decided that it was too hard to catch the ball. With a game where not hitting the wrong things can be as important as hitting the right things, players need to be able to get some control. Even I was having trouble with this, and would often have the ball roll off the end of the flipper while trying to catch it, which I think is partly due to how steep my flippers are (at rest), and thus how shallow they are when raised.

When I originally designed the game I tried to copy the layout of my Alien Star, but I messed up somehow, and part of that was that I put in my flippers too steep. A while ago I picked up a spare gottlieb inlane guide, so I stuck this in my printer and took a scan:

measuring that picture, I got an angle of 119 degrees (probably 120 in reality since that's a nice number...), while my layout was 126 degrees (fun fact, williams inlane guides are 125, so I somehow mistakenly made williams inlanes...). So I made a new inlane guide with a 120 degree angle:https://cad.onshape.com/documents/cf8933508c54fdc1d2e1cbec/w/8de46f8a59b2e2a9657a1015/e/ce2603cfd473c1490421177c

Installing it on the playfield made it look way more dramatic than it was, with the giant gap between it and the slingshot:

But the actual difference in the flippers was pretty reasonable:

So I went ahead and adjusted the left side as well, and moved the slingshot down to compensate

You can see from the old lines and holes how much stuff moved... I'm ending up with a lot of holes in my playfield! When I try to make the plastic for this, I'm going to have to be careful to note which holes are 'current' so I don't use the wrong ones when reassembling.

For the second aspect, I wanted to see whether the shot behind the pop bumper could be made if you removed the pop bumper. So I took out the pop bumper:

Gobble hole? No, I need to fill it. What do I fill it with? Well, lets just cut another hole with the hole saw and save the piece

Not a perfect fit, but for testing it works better than expected.

Now... Can you shoot into that area to the right of the back lane?

No problem!

Originally I was going to consider redesigning the lanes area to add another 'shot' here if this angle worked, but I realize there's already a handy blue target right there, that can no longer be hit by the pop bumper, so I don't really need to design any new shots. Just add an arrow insert pointing at that target and make it a jackpot or something, and it goes from 'least useful target in the game' to 'major shot'. Considering the amount of work necessary to redo this area to use two shots instead, I'm inclined to just go with the four lanes from the previous approach and this 'shot' here.

Now for the last bit, should I put something where the pop bumper was? I did a bunch of test runs, dropping the ball from each of the upper lanes, rolling it down the metal guide, shooting it from the upper right flipper, to see exactly where the ball traveled, what angle it was going at, etc, and then took a deep breath and installed two posts.

This is another case where I hate trying to place stuff, since getting these two posts positioned at the proper location and angle to get the bounce I want could take a lot of trial and error, leaving my playfield filled with holes, but I don't really have any better ideas on how to approach it. Originally I'd hoped that both ends of the rubber would be located on my disk I installed, so I could just replace it if necessary, but it was clear from my drop tests that at least one end would need to be on the playfield.

Now... does it work?

Success! I'd like it to feed a bit higher on the flipper, but proof of concept is working good. I think eventually it'll need be lowered a bit (but not so low that it obstructs the right flipper's path to the upper scoop. A bit of nudge when the ball lands on the rubber should help too. Before fine tuning further I'm going to play the game more and see how this affects other parts of the game, but throwing it around by hand it seems to be working generally how I'd like:

I had also planned to maybe put a standup behind this rubber to be hit by the right flipper, and it looks like from a very early shot you can hit the bottom edge of the rubber, so that does look possible, but I'll wait to do that until I'm sure I like this rubber and its placement. I might also experiment with alternate coil stops/etc on the right flipper to make it shoot at a higher angle.

Added a post on the upper right of the lanes, and luckily it doesn't seem to affect orbit shots, so I think that converting my two rows into one 4 lane row is doable. Plus, since I still have the switch down below, I don't need to make any further playfield changes for now to work with it. The action is also not too bad. The ball doesn't stay up there long, so you have to lane change fast, but it's not impossible. I feel like the lane change on some games makes it almost too easy.

I do wish the gates were a bit more bouncy though. You only get maybe one bounce off each of them even on a strong shot; I'd like it if the ball bounced back and forth a few times. Not sure if that's something you can do much about though. Maybe I'll play some some foam or springs eventually.

As you can see in the image though, there's one small issue: the right gate is a bit too far to the right, so the ball gets hung up from time to time. I'll need to move it a bit to the left eventually, but for now it doesn't get stuck too often.

Did some testing with the plastic covering... I previously tried to do a full playfield protector on one of my games, but as expected, it warped and raised off the playfield, presumably due to heat expanding/shrinking. However there are many european pins that have plastic playfields and don't have that issue. I'm not sure if that's due to the material (IPDB claims they're plexiglass but I don't know how they tell) or the thickness (I've now gotten confirmation that at least one manufacturer, Interflip, uses 1/4" plastic over their 1/2" plywood).

I cut two strips of plastic, one from the new sheet of lexan I bought for this project and one from the scraps that (I think) are from the previous full protector I made (hard to tell these sheets apart :/ ), and attached them to a piece of plywood, then I stuck it in my Dracula (the only game I have handy that's all incandescent) to 'bake'. After 12 hours, I could see some slight raising on the old material, and minimal/none on the lexan, which is promising at least... I'm not sure exactly what conditions are needed to reproduce the issue though. Is it just heat expanding the plastic? is it air under the plastic heating due to inserts? Presumably it's more noticeable on larger areas with no anchoring, but that's harder to test.

I also did some more practice cutting of my spare sheet of lexan. Trying regular drill bits and forstner bits. The forstner bits seem to leave more of an edge on the holes. Both seem to have some risk of creating weird spirals of plastic (like on the rightmost hole in the picture). Cutting on wood seems to help, I think since the bit can't 'punch through'. I was able to get pretty clean holes with a drill bit at medium speed. Too fast or too slow tended to cause issues. I also need to make sure to hold down the plastic around the bit as much as possible, to keep it from pulling the plastic up.

Experimented with cutting straight lines as well, and found that it's possible to do pretty cleanly with an exacto and ~5-10 passes. Definitely preferable to power tools. Can also be cut with scissors but they're hard to get into the holes since you're not cutting from the edge.

On last annoying thing: apparently the plastic sheet I purchased is 1/32". It's been a while, but I thought I'd requested 1/16 as 3/32 wasn't available, and I felt like that was the most that could be potentially layered on top of a 1/2" playfield without affecting the mechs+etc sticking through. I'll still use the sheet though since I've already got it, and hopefully it works okay. If I run into issues with it flexing or expanding, but everything else is fine, then i'll consider buying another thicker sheet

With the gate figured out, I'm almost ready to tear the playfield down and start cutting my lexan covering. There's ones area I'm still not satisfied with though: the upper right area

my original design for this was intended for it to be two offset rows of three lanes, using the shot behind the upper drops as the third upper lane. Like on EMs, you'd shoot up there, bounce around, and try to nudge into the lane you want, then fall down into the pops. But it isn't working out the way I wanted.

1. due to the path of the ball coming through the spinner, I had to remove the mini post I was going to have on the far right of the lower lane, so now balls tend to just roll off to the right instead of going over the rollover
2. there's only one pop bumper, and it's not directly below the lanes. you don't get balls going back up through the lanes much. instead, the ball rolls down to the pop, and gets shot back up to the area below the lanes, and then just falls back down to the pop again. Sometimes this can repeat 5x before the ball works its way around the pop and back into play. Not satisfying.
3. Due to the small size of the divider posts, it's much harder to nudge the ball where you want it than it would be on an older game, which would use 1/2" posts.
4. again, due to the way the ball comes in from the spinner, there's a gap between the rightmost post and the one way gate. When you shoot through the spinner, about 40% of the time, the ball bounces off the left gate and falls perfectly back through this gap, never entering any lane.
5. the lanes are so close to the top of the playfield that there isn't much room for the ball to move around. This also means that the exit of the lane behind the drops doesn't flow well since it just bangs into the top arch. I originally wanted it to shoot around the orbit.
6. because this playfield is longer than an EM, being in a whirlwind cab, the lanes are even farther away from the player, which makes it harder to figure out where the ball is going or nudge appropriately

Part of the small spacing is caused by the lane behind the drops, but I don't want to lose that shot since I want to use it for jackpots during multiball. At a minimum, I need to adjust the playfield somehow so that the ball can't escape the lanes on the right, but I'm considering reevaluating this area further...

A simplification of the lanes?

Basically changing my two sets of three lanes into one set of four. This would solve the gap on the right issue. It should function ok, as long as the rightmost post/divider doesn't interfere with the spinner shot. There'd be no room or time for nudging, so this would have to be just a lane change affair. I'm not sure how much the ball would bounce around up there though, with the upper rail so close to the posts. Would you even have time to read the ball movement and try to change lanes before the ball had fallen into one?
The pop bumper will still feel a bit weird with the ball popping into that dead area repeatedly though. I'd like to move the pop bumper down some, but moving the entire bumper isn't something you can really do once you've cut its hole, so that'd have to wait for another whitewood...

Maybe get rid of the pop bumper completely?
Although I like having a pop bumper (especially one pop bumper, which recalls games like Stars, Meteor, or TNA), I'm not sure it fits this design that well. it tends to make play on the upper playfield very chaotic. If you don't hit the drop you're going for on your first try, you're out of luck because the pop bumper will pop the ball around and take out 2-3 drops before you can get control again, which is half your hand. I'd hoped it be more of a 'danger' off in the corner, but during play the ball tends to hit it any time it's up there.

One thing I originally envisioned for this layout was that the center drops would be angled the other way, allowing you to bump the ball back towards the upper left flipper off them, but the spacing for that didn't work out. Adding a small rubber here might make the play up there more interesting, allowing you to bounce the ball back to the upper flipper. I could put a target on the back of that rubber too, to give the upper right flipper another target to shoot for. It was supposed to be able to hit the target on the upper left, under the ramp, but it turns out the flipper can't hit something that high up, so that target is basically useless.

Instead of lanes, I could try to do something like many williams EMs have?

A kickout hole with rubbers on either side to alternate the award. It's a fun area to play in, trying to nudge the ball back and forth to get it to land on the award you want. I'm not sure there's enough room for it, or what the awards could be though.

Or maybe something completely different. Get rid of the upper section completely. No more one way gates; the ball always does a complete orbit. Lots of other ways you could take this, but here's one idea I came up with:
The shot next to the drops is still there, it's just redirected to feed the right orbit cleaner. Hopefully with this the ball could feed down the right to the inlane, or get caught be the magnet to feed the upper right flipper. The area below it could be an extra hard skillshot: plunge just to the beginning of the arch to arc the ball into that lane.

Or maybe that lane is also shootable via upper left flipper? The pop bumper would need to be removed to unblock the shot, but...

Now you have two shots from the upper flipper. One feeds the left inlane to the lower left flipper, one feeds the right lane to the upper or lower right flipper, or shooter lane. I've always thought that was a cool idea, although it makes more sense on a more combo/flow game. Demolition man technically pulls it off, but the side ramp is so hard to shoot compared to the subway that everyone just goes for the subway. With equally easy/hard shots the flipper could act as a 'skill diverter' letting you intelligently set up more combos. Maybe that could still make sense for this game though, as long as the rules set up something for each lower flipper

These last two redesigns look a bit weird on first sketch, but there's a lot of room up there to tweak things and make them shoot smoothly. Having a large empty area like that feels weird to me though... As a designer I like to use up every single square inch of playfield, so having a large empty plastic like that seems like a waste, but maybe it's for the best?

Tomorrow I'm going to pull out the pop bumper and patch in some wood in the hole, and see how the upper area plays like that. Does it shoot better? Can an extra rubber there make the ball bounce back the way I'm thinking? Can the upper left flipper hit that rightmost shot? Can the upper right flipper hit that rubber?

I'll also try placing some more posts in the upper right area, see how far to the upper right I can put stuff without interfering with the spinner shot. I imagine if you get too close to the upper arch the ball is going to hit the post, since it's probably rattling around a bit as it meets the rail...

Thoughts? Any other cool ideas?

I tried to write some code to make use of the left orbit (under the ramp), and realized I had no good way of detecting shots through there. I had originally placed a rollover under the ramp, and a hanging gate across the exit from the back the ramp. That way, shots that hit the rollover first would count as orbit shots, and if a shot just triggered the gate, I'd know that was the end of a counter-clockwise shot from the spinner as it entered the left lane. The rollover under the ramp also doubles as a way to detect balls that, coming around from the spinner, fall under the ramp instead of going down the left lane, so I can raise the ramp temporarily to let the ball out. Which is good since that happens *a lot*. That should have all been good, but it seems it's possible to shoot under the ramp and not trigger the rollover, probably due to the width of the ramp and the ball bouncing around. So often I was just getting the gate switch, and had no way to tell which direction the ball was going, which was a problem. I also wanted to improve this area to give a cleaner feed to the left lane from the spinner, and prevent balls going under the ramp from the back so often.

Enter: the longest gate ever

Now it senses balls coming through the left orbit, using the same hanging wire as the previous gate did, and prevents balls from going under the ramp from the back, instead feeding them to the left lane. These little gottlieb L brackets for mounting gates+spinners are a life saver, they allow me to do all kinds of weird things with gates. Just need to make sure they're aligned properly

I realized that the top lanes still did nothing outside of the skillshot, so I decided to add a quick rule that one lane would give you more magna-pulses, but this reminded me that I still didn't have any ability to sense the flippers being pressed. I've been making do so far with using the secondary buttons for stuff like navigating menus, but you can't really use those during gameplay, and I want to add a status report soon since I'm getting to the point where the screen is getting filled up with information.

Since I'm using directly controlled flippers with high voltage contacts, this isn't as simple as it would be with software controlled flippers. I don't want to use switches on the flipper mechs like early games did since that seems to have some lag sometimes, and I can't add switches to the buttons since they're already double stacked for staging, so I'll need to do it electronically. Looking at other games, system 11, WPC, and gottlieb system 3 use opto-isolators to sense the HV signal going to the flipper, but I didn't have any on hand and have never used those before, so I tried to come up with a simpler solution.

My thought was, since my flippers are grounded by the cab switches, I should be able to just hook some 3V circuitry in parallel, since ground is the same for both. I put a diode between the chip and the cab switch to prevent the high voltage from going backward, and used a 74367 tristate buffer chip, so I could hook the switch matrix column to the enable to simulate a physical switch. A quick test with a breadboard hooked up to the switch seemed to work, so I assembled this one off board
Optimally this would have been part of my MPU board, but I wasn't sure what the circuit would look like at the time, so I left it off. Once it's battle tested I'll probably design a new MPU with the added stuff but for now this'll have to do.

Wired it up and ran into an issue... hitting either flipper button registered both sides. of course, not something I ran into when testing just one side with the breadboard. The signal seems to be traveling backwards into the playfield, through one coil to the HV line, then back through the other coil. I ended up just putting some beefy diodes in line between the flipper coils and the contacts to prevent that.

Also had an issue where the right flipper button (row 1, column 8 ) was also registering as the switch in row 1, column 1. Left button (row 7) was fine. Eventually concluded this was just due to the order I scan the matrix (row 1->8 for each column 1->8 ). I must be scanning it faster than the circuit through the chip can react, so it's still reading as closed for the next column (1 is after 8 ), but corrects itself before it gets to the other rows. Added a tiny delay after finishing the last column to account for that.