State of the Machine

The past few days I've been able to focus a little on the machine, which is always nice.

I've added three switches that were missing - top drophole, upper shooterlane and the last ball through switch. All three very crucial switches that were somehow forgotten to be added or simply to complicated to setup.

1) Upper drophole switch. Not the nicest setup in history - but considering I forgot to make room for it during design and it's extremely tight to work in that area, it looks all right and is not visible from a players perspective. (I really need to clean the board before putting on the glass!)

I'm about to rewrite the ball handling code now that I've got more (and more accurate) ways of detecting the balls so instead of "it's probably launched now" I can actually know for sure if a ball has been launched successfully. 

I've also added a little bit of decorations here and there and the machine is almost 100% physically complete. What's left is a couple of switches that needs to be tweaked after a couple of games to make them behave reliably and easier to read titles on the inserts. I have printed out new titles in white that needs to be applied before putting the glass on. Preferably.

A message system has been added to send the player small messages (or large) to hurry up or if a ball gets stuck, failed to launch and so on. The smaller one is more informative and overlays the current screen while the bigger one covers the entire screen and is meant to present more mode-related messages such as "JACKPOT!" etc. I've added a couple of modes as well such as EVE, Rapture, DNA / ADAM frenzy, JACK in order to get the game programming started. It's nice to have the machine "talking" back to you while testing!

Here's the current state of the machine.
Those of you who's been following the blog for a while probably notices a few new pieces...

2) Current state of the pinball machine.