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a pinball game inside a arcade cabinet, that alone makes it odd.
http://www.marvin3m.com/arcade/pincir.htm

Near Detroit there's Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills. He has a ton of mostly mechanical arcade games dating back a hundred years. It's a fabulous place to take a roll of quarters (and dimes, nickels, and pennies for the older games!) and lose an afternoon in.

I managed to get a couple days in Las Vegas just to visit that place. http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ Its well worth it. Pinballs packed nearly wall to wall with a few classic video games mixed in for good measure. They currently have a one of a kind prototype Williams game. They spent 2 million R&D and made two machines for testing. Feedback from the operators was "Why would I spend $10K+ for a game that makes the same as that new $5k game." After the testing, it was shelved and the two machines was warehoused and never went into production. The owner of one of them lent it to Pinball Hall of Fame for the public to play. :-) *searches....* Found it. Pinball Circus http://www.marvin3m.com/arcade/pincir.htm

When I was in college (graduated 1998), I took a software-only degree.

If I had it to do over again, I would have taken both hardware and software.

There have been times I have wanted to know what happens at the hardware level, and have been baffled by it. There is also the practical side of it: I don't like staring at a broken circuit board and not knowing how to troubleshoot and repair it.

Also, as someone else mentioned, there's the practical nature of hardware: it can't easily be outsourced, as it must often be babysat in person....

Bad idea to just burn up old Cyrix chips: if you have a Cyrix motherboard of just the right make and model, you can flip it on Ebay as it will be quite valuable.

The reason is that Williams Pinball made their final two pinball machines with Cyrix motherboards, before going out of business in 1999: "Revenge From Mars" and "Star Wars Episode I".

Because they went out of business before completing their plans to make the game software more portable to newer motherboards, these pinball machines work ONLY with these certain Cyrix motherboards!

The motherboard is Cyrix MediaGX, BAT form factor, with the CX5520 bridge. Not CX5510, and not CX5530. CPU speed should be 233 Mhz (33x7), but 266 and 200 are also rumoured to work.

A motherboard that matches this description is quite rare these days, and sells for $300 or more -- ironically, twice the price of that motherboard when it was new!

So, if you have an old Cyrix motherboard sitting around, it just might be a gold mine, think of that before melting those chips onto a hotplate....

Actually, you can get them - cheaply - on VHS and support the pinball hall of fame in the process. Go here. (bottom of page)

I love the death of pinball. At least to a point. All of the great games were made, in my opinion, between 1990 and 1999. Bally/Williams games are the only things worth buying, period. And by buying, I mean for my house. I've got around a dozen.

Here is how the death of pinball works:

1. Operators used to make a lot of money off their pinball machines. Buckets and buckets of it.

2. In the 90's, kids decided video games were cool.

3. Operators make less and less money on pinball machines.

4. Bally/Williams, the biggest pinball producer decides they can't financially justify manufacturing pinball machines. They close their pinball division.

5. Operators start pulling games from locations when they break down, or are worn out.

That's where I come in. Calling all of my local operators. Calling all of the old-school operators from the 60's. Just hoping that somebody has a warehouse full of pinball machines that I can buy, repair, restore, and resell. It's a hobby that I have really grown to love in the past year.

There is an amazing amount of pinball information on the internet, which has allowed me to do this.

Like the Marvin 3m Repair Guides or the rec.games.pinball newsgroup (try groups.google.com). If you are looking to buy a pinball machine, try the Mr. Pinball Classifieds. You can also have a look at most of the pinball machines manufactured in the past decade at the Internet Pinball Database

Or you can email me, I can set you up ;-)

And don't worry... if you want a game bad enough, and don't live close enough to go pick one up... most sellers of pinball games ship them these days.

Oh, and here is a list of my games:

Medieval Madness - Williams Funhouse - Williams Whitewater - Williams No Good Gofers - Williams Star Trek: The Next Generation World Cup Soccer 94 - Bally Hook - Data East

They are lots of fun :-)

-S

Go to an antique arcade (here's one) and look around a bit. There's machines that use electrical stimulation (low-voltage applied across the handles) and machines that use mechanical feedback (vibration, pulling, pushing). Many of these machines date from the 19th century.

There's nothing *new* about this at all.