Any new news or ideas?

[kendall...@gmail.com]

This board has been quiet for a bit so I thought I'd check in. My
homebrew went into the storage shed so we can sell our house so I
don't have any new news, but I hope there are others that are having
fun with a project.

[Adam Preble]

I've been spending quite a bit of time helping with Gerry
Stellenberg's P-ROC project, which Chris Moates was kind enough to
post about here. Last night I got DMD drawing working from inside
Python code, using the pygame library to do the drawing. Here's a
video:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/preble/3588043814/

You can view an abbreviated version of the source code here:
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/forum/index.php?topic=24.0

Adam

[poodull]

I've been away from this board for a while, but steadily working on my
machine. I've learned enough Flash to go beyond proof of concept and
into production code. I can start and stop scenes calling AS3 from my
C# shell.

I'm going a little overboard with flash and running into GPU strain
with my blurring and transitions... definitely not bothering with
DMD. Here's my multiball cut scene:
http://www.suicideinbaltimore.com/Multiball.succubus.2009.06.01.swf

You can tell right about where the 'B' shows up your computer
(depending on it's age) will shit a little brick.

There's a ton of Flash work to do still and that's what I'm
concentrating on for now while my artist-for-hire works on the
playfield. Once he finishes that up I'll be scrambling to whitewood
and start wiring up a prototype... which will mean that I'll be
waiting again until my controlling app is structured... this is a huge
project.

I still don't know what I'll use for driving... I'm leaning on a
System11 power board connected to an arduino (or teensy), but I really
don't want to write another driver in yet another language.

fc

[kendall...@gmail.com]

Great to hear about your two projects. The DMD is sweet! I'm not
going that route yet on my end, but eventually it would be cool to
learn how to control one. I'm going the flash integration route
myself.

Keep me in the loop and when I get back up and running in July I'll
start posting again!

[poodull]

Flash integration is as simple as these AS3 commands:

ExternalInterface.addCallback(string, function);
and
ExternalInterface.call(string,string);

the c# shim is the AxShockwaveFlash ocx using this caller:

string CallFunction(string);

wrap the name of the method you want to call and its parameters up in
xml and you're done. listen to the FlashCall event to get your
callbacks and you've got a communication loop (end of animation
event).

the hard part is all the media, cut scenes and coding in AS3. Lots of
java-like objects that just simply aren't java.

[cyBORG]

Try using directdraw. It's crazy fast. Try searching for some
tutorials on google. Since I'm using vb6 I used jack hoxley's
tutorials.

I've suggested this previously to nuggy on his coconut island project
and I don't think he was interested. I set my pin up eventually to
use DirectDraw @ 320x240 (plenty for a pin). So far I've got numerous
effects (zoom / pans / text / a console you can type commands into)
and it didn't take a tremendous amount of work)

Once you figure out how to use sprite and background layers it can be
amazingly powerful and perform very very well on really crappy
hardware.

I'm running my machine off a p4, 1.6 ghz 512 mb ram machine; and my
initial development machine was a Intel 440bx mobo + p3-800 CPU with
384 megs of ram. And it flew.

Cheers;
-cyBORG

On Jun 2, 10:15 pm, poodull <fcu...@gmail.com> wrote:

[White_Spot™]

Im starting a project with an Spanish Pin called America 1492 from
Juegos Populares. I dont have the most of the board (CPU Board, Driver
Board, Sound Board), so i decided to try an aproach like the PinMame-
HW project and make the necessary change in the middle to put this pin
working.

You can see a little of the thing in this Blog but it is in
Portuguese: http://www.virtualegion.com/blogs/whitespot/category/america1492project/