pinball

It is no surprise that I love pinball! At the recent PAX Australia 2013 exposition, I had the pleasure of playing an Australian made video pinball machine. Impressed with the ingenuity of the table, I tracked down Sana Nolan from Infinity Amusements and asked him to tell us about this exciting product – from inception to the current state of play. This is Sana Nolan’s story.

source: Infinity Amusements

Pinball Evolved: Infinity Pinball Entertainment System
By: Sana Nolan

Pinball – if you are of the right vintage, that one word brings back a flood of nostalgia. For the last few years, pinball has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to incredible titles like The Pinball Arcade (Farsight Studios) and PinballFX2 (Zen Studios). Unfortunately, no matter how good the software is, nothing can replace the feel of playing on a real table. For a true pinhead, a touch screen or controller just doesn’t cut it.

Over the last few years, enthusiasts around the world have solved this problem by building video pinball cabinets, otherwise known as “Hyperpin” or “Pin MAME”. These were real cabinets, with real buttons and a real plunger with 3 LCD screens to emulate the playfield, back glass and dot matrix display – and all the joy of the real thing without any of the maintenance headaches.

During the past 18 months, a work colleague of ours was building a video pinball cabinet, slowly working on it in his spare time. To celebrate its “play ready completion” he decided to show it off at PAX Australia 2013. Although I had been following the project for months, this was the first time I could get my hands on it and realize its incredible potential.

Everyone that played the cabinet at PAX Australia had two questions: “How does it work?” and “Where can I get one?” The first question was simple – with lots of time, research, motivation and (most importantly) electronics skills, anyone could potentially build their own cabinet, as dozens of people around the world have done. The second question was a bit trickier. When you build something out of love, you quickly stop keeping track of the component costs, let alone the hours of labour!

The problem with most enthusiast projects is that they often start with restoring an original pinball cabinet and the rest of the time spent on setting up the PC and MAME software. However, you cannot spend six months building a retail product which would see you get sued at the end of it!

This is where the journey of Infinity Amusements comes into the story. With the PAX Australia inspiration fresh in our minds, my wife Jennifer and I proceeded to work out all the necessary components, finding suppliers and working out the cost of the units to ensure their feasibility. Luckily, the numbers added up and the Infinity Pinball Entertainment System was born.

Microsoft invited us to show off the enthusiast cabinet from PAX Australia at their TechEd 2013 event on the Gold Coast. This event allowed us to test the waters by showcasing a “proof of concept” unit to Australia’s IT industry. With less than six weeks to the event, we completed our website and crowd-funding campaign. This was achieved with little sleep, but we knew it would pay dividends.

The showcasing at TechEd taught us an important lesson – we needed to have prototypes of our final retail machines. Everyone that played the cabinet at PAX Australia and TechEd 2013 had an absolute blast, but the machine suffered from major heat issues and various technical problems. To ensure confidence in our products, we had to demonstrate that these problems had been resolved. That was one week ago!

Since TechEd, we have been quite busy sourcing the required hardware to construct our first prototype. Thanks to the generosity of the Pinball Spare Parts Australia team, we also had a Williams cabinet to assist in getting the finalised measurements. In the last few days, we have also procured a 3D printer. This 3D printer will be critical to produce components as well as being an invaluable tool during the rapid prototyping stage.

Both Jennifer and I are geeks – half the fun of this project is the opportunity to play with different types of technologies. We find all sorts of excuses to play with new toys – I just wish I had more time to play PinballFX2!

It has been a fantastic journey and we look forward to demonstrating our retail prototypes within the next few weeks. You can follow our endeavours via the development diaries section on our website and our Instagram feed. We will also have the ausretrogamer team play test our prototypes – very exciting times!

Infinity Amusements is 100% Australian owned and we use Australian made components wherever possible. You can find out more, or contribute towards the project at IndieGoGo.