The next big thing - My Virtual Pin/Gun Game

 

And so it begins (or well, it did back in late September/Early October 2020).  I'm still working on my Scramble, getting the monitor right, finishing off the multigame switch.  But, a huge case of Covid blues hit me this summer, and I lost a lot of ground.

Enter the next fighter for my attention...  A combo virtual pinball and light gun game, roughly configured like Granny and the Gators or Baby Pacman or even in a way the Pinball 2000 games.  I say this explicitly because I need a CRT for the guns.

While most Virtual Pins seem to be using backglasses today, I am space confined.  And, I have always had a CRT for gun games mounted up to my 6'2" frame at a height like a real arcade game because standing is really the only way to play gun games, IMHO.  Same with Pinball.  So, after looking at the local retro gamer's group where one guy converted an unrecoverable Baby Pacman cabinet to a dual virtual pacman virtual pinball setup, and another guy built himself a multi-console gun cabinet... I looked over at my PS1, my Dreamcast, my NES, and my sad sad SVideo model Act Labs USB PC Gun that I bought and never hooked up properly... and I thought... TODAY IS THE DAY.  Then I went nuts, and started measuring and sketching and scheming.  That was a few months ago, and I decided I needed to document it as I'm getting closer to scrounging up all the pieces, before I make the cabinet.

Maybe I'll call it FUZzy and the Flippers, or Captain Goatee and His Gunners.  IDK yet.  I ended up calling the mini pacman build (that I failed to document here) "FUZ's Fourway".

I want to also populate it with my oddball controls, with a Control Panel layout just like Baby Pacman.  I have a 3 inch HAPP trackball, an arkanoid spinner, a trigger finger USB flight stick, and a HAPP optical Rotary Joystick that are all sitting around and wishing they could be on a system.  Since I'm space constrained, I'm planning to shove them all on the CP of this thing.

Of note... one dimension is wrong up there.  The width of a standard lockbar in pinball is approx 22.25", not 13+13=26, as I have diagrammed.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do.  I am so used to that exact width, but I also want to cram in everything.  So, we shall see.  I'm considering making the CP modular, so that I can swap in what I want.  Especially since I'd also like to be able to sometime attach a console steering wheel and play racing games too.

Next thread will be my list of purchases and costs, and I'm a Cheap Daddy and one of my goals is to see just how cheap I can make this for, and still have it be exactly what I want/need/expected.  And then, I'll fill in the gaps of tracking down each component.