Pinball Machine

Overview

The pinball machine is a solid-state arcade game in which the player launches a steel ball onto a sloped, clear-coated playfield and uses flippers to keep it in play, scoring by striking bumpers, targets, and ramps. It splits into a lower Cabinet that holds the playfield, an upright Backbox carrying the score display and artwork, and the Playfield itself.

The cabinet is a plywood body on four chrome legs with a lockable lift-out glass, a coin door, and the cabinet flipper buttons. A spring-loaded Shooter Rod (Plunger) lets the player launch the ball into the shooter lane. The backbox displays the translite artwork above a color LCD scoreboard, with two speakers behind the panel.

How it works

Play centres on the Playfield, a clear-coated board carrying every mechanism. Each Flipper Assembly is a solenoid that drives a crank and bat to bat the ball, with an end-of-stroke switch that drops the coil to a holding current. A Pop Bumper fires a yoke downward to kick the ball away when its skirt switch trips, while a Slingshot snaps a rubber band to fling the ball back. Drop targets in the Drop Target Bank fall when hit and reset together on a solenoid, and a Playfield Magnet grabs and releases the ball under software control.

The Control System runs the game. A CPU/MPU board holds the game processor; a high-current driver board switches the solenoids, flippers, and motors through relays; and distributed node boards drive nearby coils, switches, and LEDs over a serial bus. Balls drain into the Ball Trough, which counts them on position switches and serves them one at a time to the shooter lane with a kicker coil. The switching power supply and the cabinet Wiring Harness tie the boards, coils, switches, and lamps together.