Thursday 21 January 2016

Pinball: Parts

I’m in the process of designing and building a pinball machine. To give myself a head start and to work within a limited budget, I have chosen to retheme an existing pinball playfield in order to utilise its parts and layout.

This is Supersonic (built in 1979 by Bally) and is my pinball “donor” game. Supersonic is based on a theme of Concorde, it’s a relatively simple game but has a good selection of features which makes it have great potential for reworking.

The main aim in Supersonic it to collect numbers 1-2-3-4-5 at the top section to gain higher bonus point on the other number (on the star in the center and on the left side)

There should be a few expected issues to problem solve along the way, as well an Amazon basket full of items yet to complete the full parts list.

The timeframe is to get a prototype flippable playfield within the next month, with aim to fully develop artwork and have a rough and ready version by end of April, allowing a final tweaking time of around one month.


The hardware controlling how my game will run has been kindly sponsored by MyPinballs. The new Custom Pinball Controller sets (based on the Arduino programming platform) offers a framework to modify and create new games from existing playfields from the 70s and 80s. Basically it’s perfect for my project.

>Cabinet plans>


The cabinet is built and ready to go, it acts as the chassis for the pinball machine, to hold the playfield and all the hardware. Artwork will be applied to the cabinet either directly or by ‘wrapping’ in another shell of printed plywood.

This method of building sections of the project over a longer period of time is really the only way I can afford (financially and time dependently) to manage this project to ensure it gets completed. This means that certain decisions need to be made in advance of some building, design and printing. I need to retain scope of the project within a certain budget and time

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