Firepower plays a full game with the new Pinball Operating System on a custom processor board!

This is the first full blush of some hardware/software designed to operate my Firepower pinball machine, and as time goes by, hopefully a long list of pinball machines. The software executes separate threads, all in their own 'context', as if dozens of small separate microprocessors were all at work at the same time (technically, it is a threaded real time operating system, cooperative, where the threads are interpreted meta-codes). The language resembles assembly code, but only vaguely, as the commands are all pinball specific. See the web site www.pbos.info for more pics and blog.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Pinball
• firepower
• PBOS
• MPU

[ilikewires]

Thanks for comments.. one of the goals is to be able to add customized rules to the efforts of customizers and re-art projects. There is a lot of hardware in the aftermarket for that, but no platform on which to make new rules. And it was fun! Chris~

[retrogamescl]

Impressing! Recently I start to disasambly some pinball rom to understand how work a pinball machine. The price of do it this stuff is giving modern brain thinking at this machines. Firepower is a very funny game, but I think latter of achive the multiball the fun is going down and I just have in mind some ways to restore the fun level in the game, but without change the rom software that is impossible. You, ilikewires, are doing this in a another way, but perfectly functional. kudos!

[fran6go3]

Great job, thats really impressive!

[biggsterboy]

Not a programmer (which will be obvious by my question!) but I don't understand the value of what you are doing. Is this to somehow make the original game better or have more flexibility? It seems that you are basically re-creating the wheel, using a more modern hardware/software system to do what the original game was able to perform rather elegantly on it's original ROM/chip. Big fan of pinball/Firepower, but just curious what you're doing! Thanks

[sergioluna80s]

increíble! 

[Nightenstaff]

This is HIGHLY impressive. Is there a website or some way I can follow your progress? How long has it taken you to write the code you currently have and did you design the hardware involved yourself?

I am very interested in this. I'm currently doing a full mod of a Firepower II playfield (spare, no Firepower IIs were harmed in my modding process) and while this was always what I wanted to do, I lack the programming and hardware expertise to make it happen.

Again, kudos on your work!